


The Post-Apocalyptic American Dream

by bluedenimdress



Series: bluedenimdress [6]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Childhood, Coming of Age, Crossover, Daddy Hancock, Drugs, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Gambling, Married Life, POV Alternating, Past Relationship(s), Post-Game(s), Pregnancy, Pregnancy Kink, Weird Plot Shit, badassery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-29 00:53:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 35,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8469508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluedenimdress/pseuds/bluedenimdress
Summary: "…Just another freak in the freak kingdom.  We had gone in search of the American Dream.  It had been a lame fuck-around.  A waste of time.  There was no point in looking back.  Fuck no, not today, thank you kindly."Fallout 4/New Vegas Crossover.  Everybody in the desert.  Hancock is a dad.  Shaun is conflicted.  Ambrosia’s there, too.  Idk.  I suck at summaries.





	1. Synthetic Puberty

"You've come a long way, Shaun."

I absently gazed around me at the blades of grass waving across the prairie in pale brown ripples. It looked like the ground was moving, and for a brief moment, I thought it was. "We all have, dad," I answered in a daze. "Almost 3,000 miles."

I didn't have to see his chiding smirk. I could hear it in his tone. "Ya ain't gotta get smart about it, kid. I was paying you a compliment."

Slowly coming back to the moment, I looked down at my blood-smeared hands. Both of them were still gripping the handle of a knife, the blade completely buried in the carapace of a radscorpion. I attempted to pull it out, but my fingers were slick from the gory fluids. The blade stayed stuck as my hands flew back against me, and I fell on my butt from my wasted exertion. I ran my palms down my shirt and held them up to my face, just staring for a long moment.

Dad wrapped the corner of his coat around the handle, drying the blood. As he forcefully extracted it from the wound, I wondered how much of his coat's red hue was from the original dye.

He gave it a quick flip, catching it by the steel side and held it out to me. "Here. You alright, kiddo?"

I felt like I was watching someone else from the outside as I took it from him. "Yeah, I'm fine." My head hadn't really been in it at all since _Peridot._

I was still staring down at my hands. Everything reminded me of her. The knife in my right hand, much like hers, that had just stabbed through the scorpion's head, pinning it like that gator back in the vault. The pip-boy on my left… I wouldn't have that if it weren't for her. Everything reminded me of the pain she had caused me. I didn't miss her. No, not at all. But everything was a reminder… This is my life. These small hands…

"Ya went a little crazy there, for a minute. I know you got the job done, but you need to be careful. That kind of…angst… It can cause ya to slip. Which can be disastrous, ya feel me?"

"Yeah. I get it, dad."

"C'mon. Let's get back on the road."

"Alright."

I really had come a long way, and I don't mean the actual distance we had walked or even in the way dad meant. I saw everything differently. Despite my small form, I could tell I had changed a lot since we left the Commonwealth. I finally understood why mom tried to keep this world from me… not that it mattered. I would have had to find out sooner or later. The horrible things Vault-Tec did all over the country. That poor, sick little kid back in the Capital Wasteland. Raiders. Bigotry. Suicide. Succubus ghoul girls that deliberately rob you of your innocence.

Had I learned what she told me about synths not aging three or four months earlier, my gut reaction would have been to be angry with mom and dad, but now, I knew better. They didn't do this to me. They probably still hadn't figured it out themselves, given all their own problems. Their fighting got so bad, I'm lucky they even remembered I was with them and didn't accidentally leave me behind somewhere. And now mom was about to have the baby. I didn't need to point it out to them. They'd figure it out sooner or later. Whatever.

 _What difference does it make?_ I had been applying that question to damn near every experience these days.

The only thing that mattered at the moment was getting Dogmeat back.

The radscorpion carnage was long gone behind us when dad decided to pick the conversation back up. "What's eating at ya, son?"

"Nothing. It's just been a really long trip."

"Dogmeat's gonna be fine, ya know."

"I know."

Never breaking the briskness of our pace, he cupped his hands in front of his face to light a cigarette. "Look, I'm really sorry 'bout all the fighting between me and your mom. I know that shit don't just affect us, but you ain't got nothing to worry 'bout. We had to face some problems that were new to us, but we figured it all out, 'kay? I ain't saying we'll never fight again, but I'm almost positive things will never get that bad again."

"I know."

One incredulous brow slid up his face in my peripheral. "You sure do know a lot for a twelve year old."

 _Yeah. I do._ "I know you guys will be fine. I can tell you love each other. A lot. And I know that goes a long way." _And if it wasn't for Peridot, they never would have fought in the first place, but mom asked me not to mention the necklace to him, so I wasn't going to._

For a split second, I thought I may have said that last bit out loud. "You wanna talk about Peridot?" he asked.

"Why? There's nothing to talk about."

Smoke seeped through his face-hole as he spoke. "I just feel like I never got to properly address any of that because of all the crazy shit that was going on between me and your mom, and, well, you and I have a lot of time to kill now."

"Address what?"

"I know you said you weren't upset about her leaving. You'll have to forgive me for making assumptions, but I've got a few years on ya, kid, and that story doesn't add up with the conversation you and I had on the boat a few hours before that."

I was still carefully thinking my response over when he continued. "I didn't forget what you asked me…"

_I did, until just now._

"You didn't… give her the business, did ya?"

"What?"

"Slip her one?"

I knew what he was getting at. I was just unprepared to discuss it.

My lack of response must have come off as confusion. "Did you two bone?"

"No," I replied firmly.

"C'mon, kid, you can't keep shit from me. I can tell something's up."

Given this line of questioning, I felt like I could divulge a few details and get him off my back. "I took your advice and told her I wasn't ready, but honestly, she wasn't too thrilled about that."

"So _she_ was trying to pressure _you_ into sex?"

"Yeah."

He dramatically drew out the last drag of his cigarette before thumping it aside. His lips pursed and his voice dropped to almost a growl. "Did she ever mention how old she is?" he asked with sharp suspicion.

"Too old."

The air began to crackle from his silent fuming. After a few moments, he mumbled, "That heinous bitch…"

"It's okay, dad. I didn't do anything with her. We don't have to talk about it anymore."

"I can't believe I didn't even think about it at the time… I should have fucking known better. "

"It's okay. Really. Lesson learned."

"There ain't any ghoul _kids_ the same way there ain't any synth –" He abruptly stopped, his gaze resting on me.

 _Say it._ I wanted him to say it: There are no synth kids. Just me.

"Well, there's Billy," he said, intentionally trying to redirect me from his slip. "He's a ghoul kid."

_Yeah, but Billy had spent the last 200 years as close to living under a rock as someone could, being trapped in that fridge._

I could tell by dad's series of changing expressions that he was having the same thought train, just not as quickly. Yes, however rare, there are ghoul children, but Billy was an exception – the ghoul counterpart to the role I played in the synth world. Unless they were new, the other ghoul "children" of the world were more like Peridot: 200 years old and only childlike in appearance. And after all this time, people were well aware of what the radiation could do, making new ghouls much less common than they were right after the bombs fell.

"What did she do to you?" He was clearly not ready to abandon this conversation for some reason.

"I told you. Nothing. I wouldn't let her, and when she tried to, I ran out of there back to the hotel. And then you and mom showed up, and that was it."

"What do you mean when she tried to? What did she try?"

"Hey, I've got an idea, dad. Why don't you tell me more about why you and mom were arguing and how you made up?"

He chuckled. "Okay, okay, I get it. I won't ask anymore." He dug around in his pockets, trying to be discreet about thumbing a mentat. "But just the same, if you have any questions about sex, you should come to me. I took your word on it when you said you already know about it, but I just want to make sure you ain't at all…confused. What with that ancient vamp trying to bed you."

"Well… remember that time you mentioned some exploits between you and mom on the Prydwen, and you said you'd tell me about it when I got older if I still wanted to know?"

He shot me a sideways, dubious glance. "Yeah?"

"Well… I don't want to know."

He chuckled again, openly tossing the tablet into his mouth. "Ya probably do know enough about sex then."

* * *

When we stopped for the night, dad and I sat our bedrolls down near where we planned on setting up our fire. As I walked away to look for something to burn he began to follow me.

"I can do it on my own, dad."

"Just the same, it's safer if we stay together."

"True, but… I'd kinda like a little solitude for a minute."

Dad wasn't the kind to tell me no, but for a brief moment, I thought he was going to, judging by the look he was giving me. He finally sighed and lazily waved me off. "It really _has_ been a long trip. Just be careful, huh?"

The terrain was mostly open and didn't offer much cover. I had to walk pretty far to get out of dad's line of sight, but once I did, I started digging around in my pockets until I found the smashed soft pack of Grey Tortoises I had been hanging onto since mom last sent me to barter for her. Never getting any time alone anymore, I hadn't so much as broken the seal on them.

I slumped against a small, lonesome tree and slid down its trunk, still gazing with contemplation at the cigarettes I was holding. Several long moments after I was firmly planted on the ground, I slowly pulled the tab on the film, and a hint of that stale tobacco smell wafted up at me.

How old is old enough to smoke? I was regarded as twelve years old by my "parents", but I doubt I had been "activated" or whatever for that long. Physically, I was ten. Mentally? The jury's still out on that one. Which one should count? The only answer that made sense was my new-found mantra:

_What difference does it make?_

None. I will always look like a small child, and smoking is bad for you at any age.

I tapped on it the way I'd seen dad do a thousand times before, and several poked out of the end. I grabbed one and tapped the rest back in. Placing it between my lips, I fumbled with a flip lighter I had found while scavenging back in the Capital Wasteland until it made a satisfying click, resulting in a flame. In a small way, it felt powerful. Bringing the fire to my face and pulling it to the tip of the cigarette only added to the feeling. Once I inhaled that first drag, though, that's when it really hit me – that dizzying, light-headedness that I had missed out on the first time Peridot had given me one of these, because I was too busy coughing and trying to play it off.

This time, it was wonderful. Not so much because of the intended effects, but because of the concept of deliberately altering my conscious. It was my decision. I was in control. For approximately five minutes while I purposefully caused myself calculated physical harm in a pleasurable way, I was a god.

My eyes were open. Despite successfully turning Peridot down, she had still made a man out of me. She gave me a glimpse of the evils in this world, and once they've been seen, they can't be unseen. I knew I was never going to be the same, but within those stolen, nicotine-saturated moments I realized I no longer feared that change. I was embracing it. I was ready.

I clumsily thumped the spent filter down and crushed it under my toe. _This isn't the end of my innocence. This is the beginning of my life._

* * *

Once we had finished dinner and spread our beds out, I immediately laid down.

"What, no violin before bed?"

"I didn't bring it," I replied from inside my sleeping bag.

"That's a little disappointing."

I turned to face dad. "Why is that?"

He placed his tricorn down beside him and nestled into his blanket. "I really enjoy your playing."

"Since we're in a hurry, I figured it would be a waste of time."

"Don't ever think like that, Shaun. Creating something beautiful is never a waste of time. I'm so proud of you for learning in the first place."

"Thanks," I replied, deadpan.

"No bullshit. I'm still proud of your survival skills, and how knowledgeable you are of technical shit, but it means a lot to me that you have an artistic side, too. Proof that you have heart and soul."

Suddenly, I wasn't very tired. "Do I, dad?" It was more of a challenge than a question.

"Well, yeah."

"It's just numbers and patterns."

"But all of that adds up to music –"

"Anyone could do it if they wanted to. Rote memorization and muscle memory –"

"Look, Shaun, I know you've learned a lot on your own from the basic shit you've been taught by other musicians along the way, but you seem to have forgotten the most important lesson you were given."

"What's that?"

"What Agatha was telling you about having a love for music. That's what makes _you_ good. Not memorization and muscles."

"It's really not that big of a deal. I could see where it seems that way to someone who doesn't play an instrument, but I haven't even been playing anything particularly difficult."

"That's what I'm saying. It doesn't have to be complicated to be beautiful. Just full of heart. And besides, just because ya never seen me play an instrument doesn't mean I ain't done it before."

"Really?" I sat up. "And what instrument do _you_ play?"

He pushed himself up on his elbow and propped his head up in his hand. "I had piano lessons as a kid."

"So why don't you play anymore?"

"Well, pianos ain't exactly as portable as a violin."

I felt a slight smirk spreading. "Good point."

"You've picked up on it much faster than I ever did the piano, though. Ya got a gift, kiddo. I'm sure Agatha would be pleased to know you've given the Soil Stradivarius such a good home." He buried himself back in his bedroll. "So much of this world is shitty, and the day-to-day can be a challenge. It's easy to find reasons _not_ to do something, but I'm tellin' ya now, it's better to say 'fuck that' and do what makes you happy."

_What makes me happy…_

"Don't ever stop playing," he added before closing his eyes for the night.

As I laid back down, the dismal thoughts of Peridot tried to creep into my head again, but this time, I pushed them out.

That made me happy.

* * *

We traveled much faster and longer, just the two of us, as we backtracked to Sleepy Water. I stayed in my head most of the time, so there was a lot of silence, which dad occasionally broke to impart some obligatory words of wisdom. Every time he spoke, it became a little more apparent to me that he was feeling guilty for how little attention he had been paying me when he and mom had been fighting with each other. Between that and his assumption that my quiet was fueled entirely by my worry for Dogmeat, it was easy to mask the concerns I didn't feel like sharing.

Absolutely I missed Dogmeat, but I trusted bleeding-heart animal sympathizer Winona took good care of him, and I knew he would be returned to me soon enough, so his dilemma had been at the very back of my thoughts.

That is, until I saw the hot spring mountains growing on the horizon. The excitement that sparked inside me surprised me a little. I had been gloomy for so long, it was as though I had forgotten what actual happiness felt like.

The town was abuzz at the sight of us, some even inquiring where mom was, but they hardly registered on my radar at that point. Dad could handle them just fine without my input. I had tunnel vision. I was here for Dogmeat and fuck everything else.

I barely even acknowledged Winona when she came running towards me, throwing her arms around me in an enthusiastic hug. It didn't stagger me in the least.

Up at the top of the mountain trail, I stood unflinching as the Vault 86 door rolled in seeming slow motion. Only the slightest crack had been brought on the seal when I could already hear my dearest friend pawing and whimpering at the ground just inside. He flew to my open arms the moment he was released, nearly knocking me over with clumsy hugs and sloppy tongue kisses battering my cheeks. My atrophied smile muscles suddenly found the strength to stretch my face.

Everything was right in the world. At least for now.

We didn't stay long, and goodbyes were short. Back on the road, I was a little more focused with my faithful companion by my side. I noticed that, true to their word, the Children of Atom had actually picked up stake, since there was no sign of their camps at all. It bothered me a little that I didn't notice on the way in, but I found it even stranger that they got word from their base and disappeared before we arrived, since we had kept such a vigorous pace. But…

_What difference does it make?_

I glanced beside me at the lighthearted German shepherd in step with me. He returned my look with a cheerful wag, and my smile crept back again.

The problems with being a synth were still hanging over my head like a storm cloud, but with Dogmeat back, it was more of a light drizzle.


	2. Straight No Chaser

Around the halfway mark of our journey back, we came upon a small, dusty town we had passed through twice before during the day. This time, it was dark, so we decided to spend the night there.

We stepped through the swinging doors of the inn/saloon and were met with a wall of tobacco smoke and unfriendly stares. The voice of my green Commonwealth self was nagging me to tug at dad's sleeve and urge him back outside so I could convince him for us to move on, but that side of me was almost too weak to be heard anymore. Whichever one of us they had a problem with didn't matter to me. I was almost eager for them to start something over it, so I could have an excuse to be aggressive.

A glance around brought a few Brotherhood tin cans to my attention sitting around a table, minding their business, but the plain-clothes ranchers and caravan traders looked more problematic to me with their tightened expressions and narrow eyes. I didn't see any ghouls. My hand instinctively inched toward my hidden knife, hovering unassumingly in preparedness.

The sunken, dried face of the barkeep zeroed in on us lackadaisically as his arms continued the motions of tending bar on their own. "Ya'll need somethin'?"

Dad's coat tails flared at the heels of his boots as he strode forward with unwavering steps of confidence. "We're just passing through and need a room for the night."

Dogmeat and I followed closely, and I tried to exude the same level of confidence.

The bartender stared emotionlessly in an inappropriate, long pause before responding. "100 caps."

Dad didn't blink or flinch. "We only need one room for one night."

"One room. One night. One. Hundred. Caps."

Dad snickered. "What is this? A brothel or a shakedown?"

"Neither."

I took a hard step forward and slammed my hand down on the counter that was level with my face. "It's because he's a ghoul, isn't it?!"

Dad squeezed his eyes shut tight in frustrated disapproval as the bartender and several others around us burst into laughter. If it hadn't been for dad's reaction, my anger would have grown, but instead, I was hit with a pang of embarrassment.

The grizzled barkeep set down the glass he had been holding and leaned closer. "Naw, son. It's because ya'll are strangers. But being a ghoul don't help none."

Dad was already ponying up the payment. "Forgive the boy. He's just a little 'ethusiastic.'" He dumped more than a hundred caps on the counter. "Here. No hard feelings."

One side of his lip just barely curled upward as he counted the caps. "None taken." After sweeping the money off the bar and giving us a key, he set two beers down in front of us. "As long as you don't start any trouble around here, there won't be none."

"Noted." Dad pushed one bottle toward me with a smirk as he grabbed the other.

I hesitated in picking it up. Once I had it, I looked up at the bartender and spoke a forced apology because I knew it's what dad wanted. "Sorry for… earlier."

He snorted and locked eyes with me. "It would suit ya to be careful who you get salty with, kid. I appreciate your spunk, but not everyone is as good-natured as I am."

_Good-natured?_

I glared back at him in frothy silence until dad began to lead me off with a hand on my back.

Several steps away, he leaned down near my ear and spoke to me discreetly as we crossed the bar. "Don't ever go straight for the obvious 'ghoul racism' in a situation like that. It never helps."

"Even he admitted it, dad. I was just saying what everyone else was thinking."

"That's exactly why it didn't need to be said. Everyone already knew it."

I abruptly stopped. "So why bullshit? Do you really think it will ever stop being an issue if we just sweep it under the rug and pussy-foot around it?"

"Shaun, I don't know if I will live to see it ever stop being an issue within my possibly ridiculously long lifespan, but I do know that calling people racist doesn't get you a better rate on a rented room… or make you any friends."

The angry glare I had been giving the bartender returned. I couldn't believe dad was advocating rolling over for a blatant bigot. This didn't fall under my new-found blanket of indifference. This actually did matter.

"Don't give me that look, killer. I know what I'm doing. It's a little thing called 'charisma.' We ain't going to fix the entire world by calling out one racist asshat in a bar in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. But by being charming and polite, we are paving an easier path for any other ghouls that pass through this town in the future and potentially changing the mindset of the people that live here. Baby steps, alright?"

"You don't make any sense. You were unhappy about the hundred cap price but ended up giving him more than that."

"I remember. I was there. You really think a bunch of ghoul-haters are going to stop hating ghouls if one walks into their home and acts like an entitled asshole? I woulda thought you'd learned by now, ya can't just go everywhere, guns ablazing. Ya gotta be a bit more diplomatic than that. What were you gonna do? Fight the whole town?" He continued towards a table of people playing cards. "You need to remember this. Everything you do matters, so you need to play out all your moves carefully and with a backup plan, feel me? Now drink your drink and chill out."

I was tossing his words around my head, trying to understand his viewpoint when something occurred to me. "One hundred caps isn't really that bad of a price for a room…"

"I know."

"So if you knew that, and you knew he was biased against you, why were you even attempting to talk him down?"

He threw back the rest of his brew. "I like the challenge." He handed me some caps from his pocket. "Now, would you mind getting me a couple more beers? C'mon, partner. Two." I was still staring down at the caps in my hand when he began to pull out a chair from the table, asking the players if they had room for one more in their game.

"Shaun!" he called to me as I was walking off. "Get me two."

When I told the barkeep my order, he looked down at the full bottle I was still holding. "Don't you think you should finish your first one before ordering another, chief?"

"They're both for my dad."

His eyebrows lifted in the first real expression I had seen him make. "That ghoul's your dad?"

"Is that a problem?"

His brow dropped back. "Nope."

While I was waiting, I took the first sip of my drink. It was just as bad as I remembered it tasting, but in my sour state, the bitterness on my tongue felt kind of good. It was half gone by the time he returned with the drinks. "Don't," I said when his fingers hovered over the top with a bottle opener. He froze as I threw a few more caps down from my own stash. "Can I go ahead and get a third one?"

"You gonna be able to carry all of these?"

I guzzled the rest of my beer and tossed one of the unopened bottles to Dogmeat, who caught it in his muzzle. "I can handle myself just fine."

Leaning forward on the bar with one elbow, he almost looked amused as he placed another in front of me.

Back at the card table, dad was fully engrossed in the game when I set his beers beside him. "Thanks, killer." Cards in one hand, he grabbed a beer with his other without looking and tapped the top on the edge of the table, sending the cap flying.

I caught the cap midair and eased into the chair beside him, setting it in front of me. "Can I play?"

Some light chuckles spread across the players. One guy spoke up, "It's gonna cost you more than a cap to buy in."

I fished some more out of my pocket. "I got money, brother."

Dad stayed straight poker-faced, but I saw his eyes briefly dart toward me and back to his hand. I expected him to say something, but he never did.

The dealer for that round waved to the pot. "Five caps a hand." I put in my ante and, he tossed me a hand. "Five card draw, no limit."

_Good._ That was the same game I had played back in the Third Rail at our going-away party, and I was killing it back there. I tried to open my beer the same way dad did, but only banged my knuckles against the table. While I was shaking my throbbing hand, dad took my beer and opened it for me without breaking his concentration on the game.

I slid the cards into my hand and carefully fanned them out. Lots of scattered, offsuit crap. I hid my disappointment, resisting the urge to pet Dogmeat as he put his paws on the table beside me and stood on his hind legs to look over my shoulder.

Everyone before me checked, and I did, too, since it was still free-to-play. I tossed three of my cards, keeping the two that were closest together in hopes for a straight, or at the very least, a pair. No such luck. The bet was up to eight caps, and when it got to me, I folded. Already down my five cap ante, I was forced to watch as betting came down to one other guy and dad. As I nursed my second beer, it looked like it was going to be a pissing contest, but the other guy eventually folded, and dad raked the pot without having to show his cards.

The dealer passed the deck to the guy to his left and we all anted up again. I was dealt an equally useless hand as the last one, but I didn't let it discourage me. The single most important tip dad tried to drill in me back at the Third Rail was that you'll win more money if you spend more time folding than betting.

I think it's safe to say that these men were well aware of that tip, because we made it through several hands, and I had dealt twice before anyone even had to show their hand. By then, I could definitely feel the effects of the beer, and the smell of the saloon smoke was making me want a cigarette. I had never been drunk before… It didn't help that I was starting to get nervous about how much of my hard-earned caps I had thrown away with this five cap ante. Back at the Third Rail, it was only one cap per game…

…And the winning hand? A pair of fours. I had just folded with a pair of fives…

The very next hand, I was dealt a pair of jacks. If those pendejos were betting on fours, I was sure to win with that. I bet a little before the draw and half the table folded. I bet again after the draw and everyone else folded. The pot was mine, and no one even saw my jacks.

I was dizzy from the beer and the glow of winning back everything I had lost so far with just one hand. That's when I knew what I was going to do. I mimicked all the same mannerisms and bets from the previous hand with my new one, even though I had nothing. It worked, and I won once more without having to show my cards.

_Boom, bitches!_

I tried to pull the same stunt once again with a handful of nothing, but it didn't immediately scare everyone off that time. Nearly everyone called my bet, and the guy to my right even raised it. I recalled my winnings back at the Third Rail. When I had this problem then, a bigger, more aggressive bet got them to fold without fail…

My head really swimming now, I fought with my impaired motor skills, pushing a pile of caps toward the pot with an involuntary sway. "I see your ten and raise you thirty." I grinned at the sound of cards slapping the table around me as people began to fold out of turn.

But not Mr. Moneybags to my right. "Call."

I was staggered. I wasn't expecting that. "So… I raise you another thirty," I said, fumbling with my caps.

"Nuh uh," he hissed. "That ain't how this works, bud. I called. Let's see 'em."

"What?"

"Your cards. Show your cards, smartass."

My eyes instinctively darted to dad who was grimacing. "Ya gotta show, kiddo. He called."

"I, uh…"

People around the table began to snicker.

"Fuck." I flipped my cards face up. 3, 5, 8, 10, jack, offsuit.

Moneybags scoffed. "That's what I thought." He dragged the pot with a king high.

There went all my winnings. I stood up.

The now richest guy at the table smirked. "You ain't quittin' on us, are ya?"

"No, I'm just going to get another beer."

Dad gave me a stern look, but once again, he didn't say a word.

"What?" I barked at him defensively.

"Nothing. If you think that's a good idea, go ahead."

When I came back, I stayed quiet and folded the next few hands. Halfway through my third beer, I was dealt a pair of queens. And just like that, I was back in it.

It was such a good hand, I kept my betting a little low so that I wouldn't scare anyone out before the draw. Once I got my new cards, I had to hide my excitement as I fanned them out and saw a third queen next to my original pair. The bet was up to ten caps when it got to me. "I see the ten and raise twenty."

A couple people folded, including dad, but the remaining two people called, with Moneybags raising me. I called him and raised, and the odd man out folded. Moneybags called and raised me, again.

"This isn't a bluff," I told him cockily as I took a swig from my beer. "I'm serious this time."

"Okay, then hotshot, call my bet."

With my eyes locked on him, I pushed all my caps to the pot. "All in," I proclaimed with hubris.

He matched my funds. "Call."

"Read 'em and weep." I slapped my three queens down.

With collected cool, he placed his hand on the table, revealing three aces. "Sorry kid, this ain't your night."

The entire table sans dad began to whoop and holler at the ending to all the drama. That's when it hit me…

_All of dad's friends at the Third Rail. They were letting me win on purpose._

My heart sank as he slid all of the caps I had to my name to his side of the table. I was absolutely speechless and blindingly pissed. Truth be told, it was never about the money…

I stood up with white knuckles.

"Hey, fair's fair," he told me, eyeballing me flippantly.

Storming out of the bar, I nearly tripped over my heavy, drunken feet on the way out the swinging doors. Around the side of the building, I dropped to the ground and shakily reached for my pack of cigarettes, all the while with Dogmeat trying to console me. That first drag would have been enough to knock me over if I wasn't already sitting.

Dogmeat whimpered and laid his head in my lap.

"No one is ever going to take me seriously," I muttered, blowing smoke out of my mouth. "I don't need anyone or anything but you, boy." For a fleeting moment, the idea of running away flashed through my head again. Just me and Dogmeat against the world…

A few moments later, I heard dad coming around the corner. "Shaun?"

I pushed the cigarette into the dirt and swept more dirt over it. He let me get away with a lot already, and I was in no mood to test those limits in the event of failure.

He came and sat down beside me. I kept waiting for him to swoop in with his mandatory summation of the lesson I was supposed to learn, but he stayed quiet.

The longer we sat there without a word between us, the more my anticipation for it grew. Before I knew it, tears were welling up in my eyes. "Why did you let that happen?"

"It ain't my place to intervene. You wanted to play with grownups, you had to play by grownup rules. You know that."

"They weren't playing fair, though!"

"Do you really think that, or is that just the booze talking?" He reached across me into my pocket and pulled out the Grey Tortoises. I froze in a panic, but all he did was take one for himself. After he lit it, he gently slipped them back in my pocket, securing it in with a single tap.

Looking down at my contraband cigarettes, I forgot about the card game for a moment. "How long have you known?"

"Shaun, please. I already told you, ya can't keep shit from me."

"You aren't mad?"

"What good would that do? I can't stop you from doing what ya got your mind set on doing. You already know right from wrong. The rest is on you." He took a long drag from the cigarette. "Your mom's probably going to kill you, though, just so ya know."

I looked down sheepishly. "Yeah…"

"There's a lotta tough lessons out there to be learned, and I can only give you so much guidance. The rest has to be learned on your own, for instance, the experiences you had with those 'gentlemen' inside."

"That was all of my caps, dad."

"I know. Sucks, doesn't it? And that's why gambling is bad."

"But you still gamble…"

"I never bet more than I can afford."

"And drink, and smoke…"

"Moderation is key, son. You'll figure it out." He stood up and offered me a hand. "You ready to call it a night?"

"Yeah, I guess so." I wouldn't have been able to make it to my feet without his help. "So how big did you win?"

He threw an arm over my shoulder as we headed back to the saloon. "Big enough to make up for that discount we didn't get."

"I don't suppose you want to share any of those winnings, since I need to start building my savings back up."

"Oh, Shaun… I don't think so. What kind of father would I be if I deprived you of your lesson like that?"


	3. Desert Roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter before New Vegas...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to Mrs_Nicole for getting me past my writer's block on this chapter

"I don't suppose you want to share any of those winnings, since I need to start building my savings back up."

"Oh, Shaun… I don't think so. What kind of father would I be if I deprived you of your lesson like that?" The kid was probably going to have his first hangover in the morning, too. Parenting at its best… What can I say? I'm a natural.

Which is good, because I still had one in the oven back in Bomb City…

* * *

"¡Mi amor!" Felina dove into my open arms right in the middle of the dusty street.

Her kiss had all the passion of a summer storm and all the warmth of the sunlight that follows. I lifted her off the ground and melted into her. "There's my sunshine." I let her feet fall back to the ground and took a look at her pregnant belly that had noticeably grown while I was gone. "You look like you're ready to burst!"

"Yeah, ha ha." She moved on to greet Shaun. "Mi hijo." After giving him a kiss on the forehead, she acknowledged Dogmeat. "Good to see you again, boy."

I could have gladly taken her right there in the middle of the road, but it would have to wait. I put an arm around her and continued towards town. "C'mon, let's go catch up over dinner."

* * *

We ate at a little diner next door to the hotel Felina had been staying at, and Ambrosia joined us. It was then that Felina informed me that the two of them had talked it over, and the Children of Atom missionary/ex-midwife's apprentice was to be tagging along on our journey to the Mojave. My wife had already given her permission to aid in Rosalita's birth. I had my reservations about Ambrosia, but it's what Felina wanted, so I went along with it.

After a pleasant meal, Shaun went to stay with Ambrosia and we all went to bed for one last night in Bomb City before resuming our trek.

Felina closed the door to our hotel room behind us and just stared intensely at me. I was entranced by everything that she was as I returned her longing gaze. That pregnancy glow is a real thing – or maybe it was my radioactive princess she was carrying inside her, illuminating her. All I knew was, it was taking everything I had to not rip her clothes off and throw her to the floor… ravage her…

But she was the mother of my child. She deserved better. More attention…

The tinkling sounds of a wind chime right outside the window took over the electric silence, lulling me into a comfortable trance. Tearing myself away from our lusty standoff, I opened the window to allow the song to resonate better. The persistent evening breeze it brought in whipped the curtains into a frenzy. Placing my palms on top of the glass, I prepared to push it back down. "Looks like rain…"

"Leave it," she commanded firmly. "It's nice."

"Enjoy it while you can." I turned my back to the window. "I can't imagine where we're going sees much rain…"

"I don't need the rain that badly," she said, guiding me backwards with one gentle palm toward a nearby armchair. "I have you."

I dropped down onto the cushion. "Yeah?"

"The desert may be hot and hellishly dry… But the heat feels good…" She placed a hand on each of my thighs and began to lower to the floor in front of me. "So, so good…"

On her knees between mine, she slid her hands up my thighs and swept them over the bulge she had been nurturing with whatever this stimulating monologue was she was laying on me. I ain't even sure if it was a coherent thought, but the subtext was effective.

"But it can be unbearable..." Her delicate fingers began to work at the closure on my pants. "Without some kind of relief…" She careful timed her words, freeing me deliberately at the end of that statement.

"Damn, Felina…" With her fingers wrapped around my shaft, I sighed contently. "We ain't talking about the desert anymore, are we?"

Her nefarious, thirsty eyes looked up at me as she traced my head with her tongue. She paused momentarily to tell me, "I missed you terribly," immediately before taking me into her mouth.

As I reached the back of her throat, I almost rose up out of the chair. That heat she was talking about – that was also very, very real. A primal groan escaped me as she increased her suction, pressing and swathing her tongue around me in ways I couldn't visually map out amidst the fierce pleasure that was flooding my senses. I reached for her, weaving my fingers into the loose locks of her silky, soft hair that were waving around her face in the gentle gusts blowing through the window.

Spellboud by all the luxuries bestowed upon me by every facet of what was happening in that room right then, I could come at any time, but I wouldn't have it. I wasn't done soaking up that moment. I swept my fingers to her face, bringing her gaze to mine. "Come up here, Felina," I gently pleaded of her.

Her brow curled inward as she looked down at her round midsection. "Easier said than done, querido."

I held my hands out to her. "I'll help." Pulling her to my lap with her legs over the arm of the chair, I carefully pushed the fringe of her skirt up her thighs, giving the enticing, vulnerable flesh there a firm squeeze as I drew closer to her face. "I missed you, too, love. More than you can imagine."

Hooking my fingers back under her dress's edge, I helped her shimmy the article off over her head. With her completely bare in my lap, I ran my fingers slowly over all of her curves. "You're so beautiful, Felina. I don't know how I survived so long without laying eyes on you." I let my fingers fall down past the dark nipples on her full breasts, resting them on the layer of flesh separating me from the child I had helped make. I began to close the gap between our mouths.

"Beautiful?" she balked. "I'm as big as house…"

"You are a house, love," I said with equal irreverence. "Our baby is living inside of you."

"That's what I'm saying –"

"That's what _I'm_ saying. Let that sink in: You and I created another life together, and you have graciously carried her these past seven months. I know I couldn't do it."

She smirked. "It's not like I had much of a choice, mi amor."

"So would you take it back if you could?"

Her smirk widened into a full blown smile. "Never."

"That's what I thought." With my arms under her, I began to pick us up from the chair.

"What are you doing?! I'm too big! You can't lift me…"

"Wanna bet?" I carried her to the bed and laid her down gently.

"Show off."

I stepped out of my pants. "But you like it." I crawled over her and brought my mouth to hers, trying to express my gratitude through kiss, knowing it was impossible to ever fully demonstrate how much she meant to me. She'd never know. There's just no words or actions that can describe the immense feeling of love I have for her.

But I could still try.

I traveled over every inch of her luscious body, laying tender, soulful kisses and relishing every squirm and moan I elicited from her in the process.

She propped her back up against the headboard. "Are you going to tease me all night, amor?"

"I'm just trying to build your desire up as much as mine," I replied with slyness.

"It's been building for a month," she pouted. "How much longer must I wait to feel you?"

I smoothed my palms down her sides, admiring her supple curves. "Not much longer," I answered distractedly, my head already dizzied by my two-steps-ahead dirty thoughts. The first crash of thunder from the imminent storm brewing outside shook the building, and before I was even aware of what I was doing, my hands grabbed hold of her hips, assertively flipping her over.

She mewled, positioning herself on her hands and knees in front of me. I mentally lauded the sight before me, hesitant to defile it with the indecent things I was prepared to do.

But a beckoning wiggle of her behind reminded me she wanted me to do those filthy things.

My fingers gingerly caressed over and around her most intimate area, gradually working further inside. The moment I breeched the entrance, her hips jerked violently. "Oh, fuck!"

I twisted the two exploratory fingers back out. "You like that?"

"Oh, yeah," she whimpered, her face falling towards the pillow until her words were muffled. "But you know what I really want."

I probed a little more, dragging her sweet juices along her rim and promptly licking the rest from my fingers. "Yes, I do." I crawled across the mattress on my knees until the gap between us was closed, and snaked my hand around to her belly hanging under her. That was part of me, already inside her. To be here… In all my years I spent as a detestable junkie, somewhere along the way, I must have done something right.

She grinded up into me harder as soon as she felt a graze of my groin against her ass. "Please, John. I need you."

I would have loved to drag this out longer, but those words were my weakness, and she knew it. I drew back until my tip was resting at her opening, and with one stalwart thrust, I ran her clean through.

The resulting wail was by and far my favorite song. "John!"

A guttural growl was the only response I could manage. _Fuck,_ she felt _good_!

Outside, faint taps of raindrops growing closer together and hitting the building sounded like they were falling in the room with us. With the window still open, no doubt some were. For some reason, that egged me on.

I tightened my grip on her hips and tried to take it slow. I was mildly successful for a while, but Felina kept thrusting back into me, forcing me in harder, deeper. I picked up the pace as the rain fell faster, and my hand instinctively slapped at the fattest part of her ass with a jarring clapping sound.

"Fuck, _yes_!" she cried.

"More?"

"Yes!"

With a restrained exhale through pursued lips, I drew back and gave her another slap in the same spot, pink with my handprint. She cried out for more. From there, it devolved into slap after slap as I bottomed out over and over, and I'll be damned if she wasn't loving every moment of it, despite struggling to stay on all fours. With the rain, her moans, and the cracking of my palm against her flesh as my soundtrack, I was so immersed in the sum of it all, I missed every sign of her impending orgasm and didn't catch on until her juices were already dripping down my dick.

"Felina…" The moment I realized it, I was coming, too, pulsing against her hot walls, our fluids mingling into a sticky mess.

She let herself fall on her side to the mattress, still panting and moaning. I immediately joined her.

I glanced over at the open window with its curtains gently fluttering around it. "Want me to close the window now, love?"

The hardest part of the storm was over, and the armchair where this all started, along with everything else by the window, was already completely soaked.

"Seems kinda pointless, now, doesn't it?"

I chuckled.

She began to sit up, but appeared to be having difficulties. I gave her a hand, my touches lingering past confirmation that she was comfortable.

Her eyes trailed across the room. "Would you bring me my guitar?"

"Sure."

When I handed her the instrument, she did her usual messing around with the little keys at the top until she was happy with its sound. "Want me to play you a song?"

I laid down beside her, folding my hands on my chest. "Always."

 

_"Out in the West Texas town of El Paso_

_I fell in love with a Mexican girl_

_Nighttime would find me in Rosa's cantina_

_Music would play and Felina would whirl"_

 

I was immediately at full attention. This song… I had been trying to get her to play this song for me ever since I bought her that guitar. Her singing and playing couldn't be lovelier, although I soon realized that it was in stark contrast with the lyrics.

 

_"Blacker than night were the eyes of Felina_

_Wicked and evil while casting a spell_

_My love was deep for this Mexican maiden_

_I was in love but in vain, I could tell…"_

 

More verses than I could ever count later…

 

_"…Back in El Paso my life would be worthless_

_Everything's gone in life; nothing is left_

_It's been so long since I've seen the young maiden_

_My love is stronger than my fear of death…_

 

_…And at last here I am on the hill overlooking El Paso_

_I can see Rosa's cantina below_

_My love is strong and it pushes me onward_

_Down off the hill to Felina I go…"_

 

_…But my love for Felina is strong and I rise where I've fallen_

_Though I am weary I can't stop to rest_

_I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle_

_I feel the bullet go deep in my chest_

 

_From out of nowhere Felina has found me_

_Kissing my cheek as she kneels by my side_

_Cradled by two loving arms that I'll die for_

_One little kiss and Felina, goodbye"_

 

She swept a tress of her hair out of her face in annoyance. "Satisfied?"

I smiled. "In more ways than one, love."

"Well, you can't say you've never heard it anymore." She started to slide the guitar against the wall by the bed.

"Wait!"

"What?"

"You can't leave it like that. Play me another song."

"What do you want to hear?"

"Play the one about Rosalita."

"Alright." Her own smile returned as she let go of the guitar's neck.  She began to sing without musical accompaniment:

 

" _Rosalita, my little rose of the rancho_

_You won my heart down by the Rio_

_Dry your eyes and don't be blue_

_Nanita, I'll come back to you, my Rosalita…"_

 

When we continued on to New Vegas, I made her sing that song for me every night from then on out, to make sure I knew it by heart.

Because of this, the very first time I held our little girl in my arms, I was able to sing it for her:

 

_"…Each night I tell the moon on high and all of its glory_

_Of you and I and days gone by and love's sweet story_

_Rosalita, another day is dawning_

_For you I'm longing, Rosalita_."

 

When the verses were over, I kept humming and rocking her, still in awe over this little thing my wife and I had made together. It was incredible. She was incredible. My little Rosalita.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for all the song verses. There's not going to be a whole lot in the rest of my story, but I felt these were important


	4. Far From Any Road

"The Hoover Dam. Nevada is just on the other side."

"You ready, love?"

She picked up Rosalita in one arm, the babe not even a day old yet, and held my hand with the other. "Born ready."

Ambrosia became visibly nervous the closer we got. She didn't even seem to notice me staring at her when we got to the dam's edge. "Everything okay, there? You're looking a little nuttier than usual."

"Well… we haven't encountered any Legion, so far so… couldn't be better."

"Legion?"

Before she could respond, a dusky male voice called down from one of the dam's towers. "Well, if it isn't the mother fuckin' mailman."

We all stopped dead in out tracks. The man was pointing a sniper rifle down, and my eyes followed the barrel to Ambrosia.

When she saw all of us were staring at her, she looked up at the sniper and spoke in an assertive, take-no-shit tone I had never heard from her before. "You've gotta be fucking kidding me. I've been gone seven years, and your face is the first one I see. And that stupid beret... "

"The years have _not_ been good to you..."

"What are you gonna do? Shoot me?"

"Come on, Amy. You know if I was going to do that, you would have been dead at least a mile ago."

"So why are you still pointing that thing at me?"

"Despite how badly I think you deserve a bullet, my opinion of you is in the minority around here. However, I will not hesitate to shoot you if you try to pull anything."

"I never had a problem with you, Craig," she said wistfully. "Just the NCR."

"We've been over this. If you have a problem with the NCR, then you have a problem with me."

Felina yanked the stroller from her, placed Rosalita in it, and rolled it behind us as she drew closer to me. "What's the NCR?" I noticed her hand gravitating toward her pistol, but I was inclined to believe we weren't in any real danger, judging by the fact that he let us come this close without firing a single shot.

The sniper looked at us from over the top of his shades. "The New California Republic. What planet are you from?"

I smirked. "Planet East Coast."

"This may come as a shocker to you," Ambrosia said to him, "but the Bear's arms haven't reached that far."

He finally started to lower his rifle. "Not really. Things have changed since you left."

"Good."

"So why are you back?" he growled.

"Why aren't _you_ in Novac?" she barked back.

"Long story."

"I'm not really interested in a long story, right now. Let me get the short-short version: Do we even want to cross this dam right now?"

"You? Yeah, you're not going to have any problems with the way things are."

"I take it you do?"

"Caesar is dead and the Legion is gone. I can't complain too much."

"Knowing you, I bet you could still find a way."

"I could, but a lot of that's your fault."

" _Of course_ it is." Ambrosia retorted.

"The NCR pulled out of the Mojave, so it may as well be."

"Fuck 'em," she mumbled under her breath as she started moving forward again.

We began to tentatively follow. As we passed the sniper, he shouted down to Ambrosia, "Hey, Amy! Just so you know, even though most of the people 'round here respect you, Veronica still hasn't forgiven you either."

She flinched a little as a frown contorted her face where he couldn't see. "I'll keep that in mind." A couple steps further, she turned to face him once more. "Wait. So if Caesar and House are dead, and the NCR has pulled out, who's dam is this then?"

"Yes Man's."

"Right, but who's pulling the strings?"

"No one."

"…How?"

"You know I don't know how all that computer shit works. I'm just here to make sure the Legion doesn't come back." He pushed his shades back up his nose and turned back to the desert. "Why don't you go ask the Followers or something?"

She resumed her path to the other side, along with her angry mumbling.

I looked around at all the one-wheeled robots rolling around the dam's walkway. They all had broad shoulders, long arms, and tube screens with the same menacing, military-helmeted man picture for a face.

Felina picked Rosalita back up out of the stroller and began to drag it behind her with one hand as we continued along the dam, her eyes also following the motions of the robot guards. "Do we need to worry about someone named Veronica pointing a gun at us, too?"

"Ya'll got nothing to worry about. Boone and Veronica's issues with me are strictly personal."

"Who's Boone?"

"That guy with the 'tude back there."

I went for my mentats as I tried to gather my thoughts. "I have so many questions right now…"

"Yeah," she snapped uncharacteristically, "and I'm sure I have all the answers, but can we just not talk for a little bit?"

Felina came to a dead halt with fire burning behind her eyes. "Actually, Ambrosia, I have an issue with that," she said with restrained anger. "We have been 'not talking' about any of this for hundreds of miles. There appears to be a lot of shit you could have told us before we got here, and if you're embroiled in anything dangerous, we have a right to know about it if you expect to keep traveling with us."

She sighed as she stopped once more. "Look, I'm sorry for my tone. Boone just drudged up a lot of bad memories. Ya'll gotta remember, I left this place for a reason, but there's literally no danger here, alright? You heard him. The Legion and NCR are gone."

"That's exactly what I'm talking about," she retorted as she held Rosalita closer to her chest. "I don't know what the Legion and NCR are, and if they're so dangerous, you probably should have warned us about them beforehand since you had no way of knowing until we got here that they're gone."

"I did. I told you back in Sleepy Water that there were a lot of hands fighting for control over this region, but specifically, they are no worse than any other dangers you encounter anywhere else. This place was inhabitable when they were still here, but it's an incredible turn of luck for ya'll that they're gone now. And like I said, Boone and Veronica dislike me for personal reason. Nothing that will affect any of you."

"How personal?" Felina asked.

When she didn't immediately respond, I took a stab in the dark by making a one-finger-inside-the-other banging gesture.

She motioned toward me with exasperation. "Something like that."

In my opinion, that explained plenty.

Ambrosia's voice dropped to a pitiful plea as she took hold of the stroller's handles once more. "Can we please get moving now?"

Felina threw her free arm outward. "Fuck, I guess." She moved to the front of us and took the lead.

We were almost to the other side of the river when Shaun fell in step beside Ambrosia and broke the awkward silence. "Okay, so 'Amy' is short for 'Ambrosia,' right?"

"Yes."

"But why did he call you 'mailman'?"

"Because," she said, a slight smirk budding as she gazed ahead. "I'm the mother fuckin' mailman."

* * *

Once Ambrosia had cooled down, she started going on about "The Strip," which is where she expected Felina wanted to go. "I realize you two have a newborn infant on your hands and may not be interested in gambling at the moment, but it was the most developed area when I was here last. I could probably get ya'll some really nice accommodations there until you find a more permanent place to stay. Plus, I'm friends with a group of humanitarians right outside in Freeside, and there's a great little clinic around the corner."

That sounded agreeable to me, but as we neared Freeside, my wife veered us north without any explanation, trudging across the sands and rocks with sudden determination.

"Where ya goin', love?"

Felina never responded. Once we were within sight of some crumbled overpasses over some railroad tracks, she was nearly sprinting, Rosalita still in her arms. I quickened my pace, and when she disappeared from my view over the top of some concrete rubble, I ran after her. "Felina!"

From the concrete's peak, I saw a small, dilapidated ranch house near a shed and a windmill at the base of some rocky hills and caught a glimpse of Felina kicking in the door. With very little effort on the downslope, I slid into a sprint and was barely able to stop as I barreled through the open doorway. Felina was just inside, standing perfectly still, holding Rosalita and looking down at some skeletal remains sitting on the couch.

I walked up slowly next to her, reaching for the baby. "What's going on, Felina?"

As soon as the baby was out of her arms, she dropped to the corpse's feet and began sobbing with her head in her hands. I glanced behind me and saw the rest of our party hanging back just outside. I passed Rosalita off to Ambrosia and came back to my wife's side, kneeling by her with a reassuring hand on her back.

I looked back at the skeleton. "Do you two know each other?"

She sniffled and managed to whimper, "She's mi mamá."

"Wait… are you sure?"

"Yes!"

Taking a better look around, I noticed guitars hanging on the walls and dusty pictures on the mantle of a tan woman and a small girl in a blue dress with espresso brown hair hanging messily in her face. It was the spitting image of Felina.

I put my arms around her and let her get it all out. What could I say?

She let herself fall to the floor on her ass, and I followed.

"I don't know what I was expecting?" she said, once she began to dry up. "If I don't have the gene that would make you turn ghoul, there's not much chance she would either."

I grabbed her hand. "I'm sorry, love."

"I guess I just… I dunno." She stood up and started drifting down the hallway and into a bedroom at the end. I followed and watched from the threshold as she absently picked up trinkets from the dresser and set them down after some small consideration.

I leaned on the doorframe. "Is there anything I can do?"

She had her back to me, looking down at a holotape she had just picked up. "Yeah. Bury her." She put the tape in her pip-boy, but didn't press play. "I'm going to go take a shower."

Not the simplest request, but I was more than willing to comply. "Of course, love."

She grabbed a towel that was hanging on the bedpost, shook it out, and started toward me.  Anticipating an embrace, I smiled at her warmly, but she turned sideways and moved past me with her head down. That's…fine. If she needed a moment, she could have all the moments she needed.

I went back outside and explained the situation to the others. Ambrosia took Rosalita inside, and Shaun volunteered to help me with the manual labor. Sadly, this wasn't his first burial he helped with. Once he and I had found a couple digging tools in the shed, we came back for our guest of honor and carefully transported her outside.

The desert night was cool, but once we started digging, we were plenty warm. The ground was dry and hard, though. After some effort, the depth we had broken was probably not the most ideal, but we at the very least needed a break if we were to continue. Once inside, I went to the bathroom to check on Felina.

When she heard the door open, she spoke from behind the shower curtain, the water still running. "Don't mind me if you need to use the bathroom. Just go about your business."

"It's just me," I replied as I picked her clothes up off the floor and hung them on a hook. I moved her pip-boy off the toilet lid to sit there by the tub. "Hey, I hate to bother you with this, but, um…"

"What?"

"Do you, uh, want us to wait for you before we…close things up?"

"No. That won't be necessary."

I wasn't ready to leave her just yet. I felt like I should do something, I just wasn't sure what.

She cleared that up for me. "Play that holotape."

I reached for the pip-boy and did as she said. There were light scuffling noises at first, but then the sound of tapping and an unfamiliar woman's voice, "Uno… Dos… Tres… Cuatro…"

An acoustic guitar began playing chords in an energetic rhythm. After a few bars, a second guitar jumped in playing a flamenco style lead. It started out simple enough, but as the music progressed, the lead became faster and more complex.

I was pretty sure I understood what I was hearing. "Is that you and your mom?"

"No. That's just mi mamá."

"Playing both guitars?"

"That's just one guitar, querido."

The music began to slow down to pretty little plucked strings that resonated like twinkling stars. She gradually began to build the song's excitement again, flowing back and forth between the two extremes getting faster every time. "That's really impressive."

"I know. She was very talented. And amazing in so many ways…"

"You truly are your mother's daughter, then," I offered, trying to cheer her up a little.

"I met Nate while I was in college here. I lived here with mamá until we got married…"

"Yeah?"

"…Does it bother you when I talk about Nate?"

"No, of course not, love."

"I just wanted to make sure it didn't make you feel weird or anything."

"No, it's fine. You met him literally hundreds of years before I was ever even born. And I know you cared about him. If you didn't miss him at least a little, I think _that_ would bother me."

"When Nate and I first met, it was at a casino where I worked as a waitress the summer before I went to college. Sometimes, they would let me play guitar on stage as filler on slow nights when the headliners weren't performing and the house band was on break."

"I thought you hated performing for strangers."

"I do, I just wish I didn't. I've never been as good as mamá, but I liked doing it then because it was essentially playing to an empty room. Anyone who happened to be nearby wasn't there to watch me. They were busy feeding the slot machines. But not Nate. I had caught his eye earlier in the night when I was serving drinks, and when he noticed I was on stage, singing and playing 'Johnny Guitar,' he made it his business to watch. When I finished the song, he teased me a bunch, asking if Johnny was my boyfriend, which was his clever way of finding out if I was seeing anyone. Because of his quirky little sense of humor – you'll probably get a kick out of this – when we were dating seriously, he would still joke about my 'other boyfriend John' from time to time and the rumors he heard about me being bold with him."

"Bold is putting it lightly," I said with a smirk.

"I thought I had gotten over the feeling of emptiness from everything the war had taken from me, but I only got to see for myself the immediate destruction in Boston. That place had only been the setting of the last couple years of my life before the bombs. This place here… This was the bulk of my life. But hell, I've spent more time with you than I did with Nate at this point… I mean, maybe not chronologically, but in a cumulative sense."

I didn't realize that before, but I could see what she was getting at. Felina and I did everything together, but everyone worked regular 9 to 5's before the war. And then there was that whole military thing… I never asked about Nate because I didn't want to make her feel bad. I always just picked up whatever info she offered when she offered it, but I got the impression from this conversation that his deployments kept them apart a lot.

The song came to an end, and all was quiet for a moment except for the water still running behind the shower curtain.

Felina continued, "Maybe it meant something. Maybe not in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that I was there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…" she trailed off.

"That sounds familiar, somehow."

"I guess what I'm saying is, I must have always been destined for this post-apocalyptic life, and I'm okay with that, but it still feels like the cosmos kind of gave me the finger for starting me out in an entirely different set up only to take it all away later."

It suddenly occurred to me how much time had passed since Shaun and I started digging the grave, and I pushed the shower curtain back. Once I did, I saw that she was sitting in the tub naked and dappled with droplets of water. The shower head nozzle was removed and lying by her feet, the water rushing straight down the drain. "How long have you been sitting there, love?"

"Just as long as you think."

I put my fingers under the tap. "You need to get out of there. The water ain't even warm."

"It never was. The water heater's broken."

I grabbed her towel and reached for her. "Come on, Felina. Let's get you dry and dressed."


	5. Heaven Beside You

I got Felina all warm and tucked into her childhood bed when I heard the baby starting to cry. I kissed Felina on the forehead. "I'll be right back, love."

I found Ambrosia struggling with a fussy Rosalita.

"She's hungry," she informed me.

"So, let's feed her."

Ambrosia cleared her throat and glared at me.

"Oh. Right. The boob thing." I took Rosalita from her. "I'll take her to mommy, and you guys can settle in for the night."

When I returned to Felina, the baby immediately stopped crying as soon as she was presented with a bare breast. A smile began to creep across Felina's face as she looked down at Rosalita.

Relieved by my observation, I left them to retrieve the stroller. I parked it by the bed and kicked my boots off so I could recline beside them, just enjoying the sight of my wife feeding the precious little life we had created together. I knew whatever pain she was feeling back in the bathtub about this place was bittersweet, and that ultimately, she wouldn't let the sadness take her.

Once Rosalita had fallen asleep, I gently took her from Felina's arms and leaned over the side of the bed to lay her in the stroller. When I turned around, Felina was on her knees on the mattress with the blanket around her. "What are you doing now?"

She let the blanket fall from her bare body and wrapped her arms around me, bringing her lips close to my ear. "I love you, John," she whispered.

I smiled. "I love you, Felina."

"Would you do anything for me? Give me anything I want?"

"Of course."

She began to pull away from me slowly, her loosely draped arms dragging her flesh softly across me until she put them behind herself to brace on, splaying suggestively. I couldn't help but notice how large her breasts still were. I was wondering how long that would last as she breathed the words, "Know what I want?"

I was already unbuttoning my shirt. "I think I might have an idea."

"No. You don't. Let me tell you." She grabbed hold of the sides of my shirt and pulled me down to her. "I want you to make love to me..."

"Yeah, I got that much." I tossed my hat over the side of the bed.

"Over and over again…"

"I can do that." I pulled my belt off.

"I want you to come inside me. Over and over again…"

I was opening my pants. "No problem."

"I want you to do your best…"

I pushed my pants down and positioned her between my legs. "Planned on it."

"…To put another baby in me."

I froze, sitting back up. "Felina… love… You know that ain't gonna happen."

"You can try."

I sighed. "Are you being serious right now or is this, like, a role-playing thing?"

"We didn't think you could before, and …here we are."

We both looked over at the stroller briefly.

"Yeah, but that was a freak accident."

"But who's to say we couldn't have another 'freak accident'? We weren't even trying then. What if we were? The great Magnet in the sky made it possible once, it could do it again, somehow. I'm finally home with a blank slate, and, after taking a tally of my life, I don't think anything would make me happier than being John Hancock's arm candy, barefoot and pregnant in the desert with a part of you inside me at all times."

"Felina…" I crumpled into a defeated pile beside her. "You know, honestly, I don't think there's anything I'd love more than to keep you fat with my offspring forever just because of what that symbolizes, but even if that was possible, you and I both know it ain't practical." I suddenly thought of that serum I had been hanging onto all these months that would turn her ghoul. I hadn't spoke to her about it yet, strategically waiting for some time after Rosalita was born, and in that moment, I had a feeling she wouldn't go for it. Not if she had fantasies of being a baby factory.

"I'm not an idiot, John. I know how impossible it is, but… I still want you to try. Carrying your child inside me…" She placed her hands on my shoulders and guided me on top of her. "…it felt so pure and right. I want you to fill me up with your seed like we're making another."

"Okay…" There was something so genuine, yet provocative, in her voice, that she almost made me believe we could.

"Fuck me with purpose…" She slid her hand between us and rubbed her thumb over my head, smearing the beads of precum.

"I always do," was my breathless reply.

"Fuck me like you mean it."

I was out of words. I pushed my lips to hers forcefully, and the rest of my blood rushed downstairs. She moaned into my mouth as I grew harder and pressed against her.

I began to trail my kisses down her body, but she grabbed my face with both hands and pulled me back to hers. "We're making a baby, remember?"

I nodded, looking deep into her eyes.

"So put your cock in me."

"Fuck…" I had no idea why this was turning me on so much. A pleasurable shudder washed over me as I swept my tip up and down her slit, feeling how wet she was already. And so hot…Feverishly hot. "If that's what you really want." I started to ease in a little bit. "Is that good?"

"Yes…" she hissed.

I pushed in a little further. "This what you wanted?"

"Oh, yes..."

Further still. "You want this cock?"

"Yes… all of it…"

I pushed in all the way, and she made a frantic sound I had never heard from her before. She began to recoil away from me, her legs closing and squeezing against my sides.

I stopped all movement. "What's wrong?"

Her breathing was erratic, but not in the way it would be if she was enjoying herself. "Nothing…"

"No, that was something."

"Please, just…" She wrapped her arms around my neck. "Where were we?"

I was at a loss. "Um…"

She bucked her hips up at me.

"Oka-a-ay…" I started to enter once more, but the deeper I got, the more contorted her face became. Her moans were different, and it felt more like her muscles were trying to push me out than hang on. "Are you okay, love?"

She nodded, hard, her eyes squeezed shut. I withdrew from her, and she opened her eyes. "Why did you stop?"

"Something's wrong, Felina."

"No –"

"Did that hurt?"

Her eyes grew wide, quickly averting my gaze. She started reaching for me. "Only a little."

"Nuh uh." With that, my arousal was gone. I sat on the edge of the bed and reached for my pants. "You're still sore from childbirth."

She bolted upright. "I can handle it, John."

"I ain't gonna do it if it's hurting you, Felina." I got the cigarettes out of my pants pocket and lit us a couple. After I handed one to Felina, I pulled my pants on.

She took it from me. "You won't have sex with your wife because you think you're too big or something...?

"I didn't say that –"

"But I just pushed a whole human out of that hole." She eyeballed me funny while taking a drag of her cigarette.

"Exactly. It ain't gonna kill us to wait a few days."

"Okay, Mr. Moral Highground, but you do realize you're smoking a cigarette two feet away from the baby."

"Fuck." I licked my fingers and pinched the end of it. "It was merely an oversight. I ain't used to having a baby around yet."

She didn't put hers out. Instead, she stood up and grabbed my coat, putting it around her naked form. "Vas conmigo, querido. Take it outside."

Watching her sashay out the door in nothing but my coat, I started to get hard again. _Damn._

Felina had already disappeared from view when I looked over at Rosalita sleeping soundly. "Thing's are gonna get easier, right?"

She looked like an angel, curled up in a soft little ball, with her barely-there, downy wisps of blonde hair and her chest rising and falling with every little peaceful coo she breathed.

I smiled as I bent over to kiss her head. "Of course they are." I put the extinguished cigarette between my lips and followed after Felina.

* * *

The sun wasn't even up yet when Rosalita woke me with the song of her people – lots of tiny-voiced screeching. _She's going to be a crooner, just like her mom_ …

Felina was still peacefully asleep throughout this affair. No doubt she was exhausted from the past couple days' events, so I attempted to calm the crying baby on my own. I clumsily changed her diaper, having to search for a fresh one and unsure what goes where.

I finally got the cloth securely attached, and looked around the room, at a loss as to what I was supposed to do with the dirty one. _Fuck…_

The baby was still whimpering, ramping up for a louder bawl. I tossed the soiled diaper out the window, intent to deal with it later, and picked the little banshee up out of the stroller. I rocked her, speaking to her softly, but she wouldn't stop fussing. "C'mon, little rose, mama's real tired. Can you be good for daddy, huh?"

Cries, cries, and more cries.

Reluctantly, I nudged my wife's shoulder. She rolled toward me with her eyes still mostly closed. "¿Qué?"

"It's Rosalita…"

"Mmm," she groaned knowingly. "Give her here." She pulled the blanket off her chest and drew Rosalita to her nipple. That's all it took. Something I couldn't do, though. Felina yawned, still groggy. "I got this, querido. You can go back to sleep."

"Nah, I'm up now." I got dressed and rifled through my pockets, deciding on my usual fallback of a mentat. When I returned the tin to my pocket, I slipped a cigarette out of the pack and placed it in my mouth. "I still gotta… I got some stuff to do. I'll be outside if ya need me."

I lit the cigarette as soon as I was out the front door. Returning to the half-dug gravesite on the other side of the house, I was only mildly surprised to see Shaun leaning against a fence post, also smoking a cigarette. I glowered. "So that's still a thing, huh?"

Catching him off guard, he momentarily froze, but relaxed again when he realized it was me.

I picked up a shovel. "Well, if you're gonna act like you're grown, you best get back to work." I tossed him the shovel and grabbed the other one for myself.

He sighed, but immediately resumed the task without any backtalk.

The bone-dry ground, having gotten cool overnight, was even harder than before. After a while, light began to ominously lurk into the sky with the promise of smoldering heat. I was already warm from the vigorous work, and found myself removing my coat and vest, hanging it on the fence post.

Once the sun had made it all the way into the sky, Shaun stopped and removed his Minuteman tricorn, fanning himself with it a little. "C'mon, dad. Isn't this deep enough?"

I stopped to unbutton my shirt and tie it around my waist. "I may have raised a morally-flexible prepubescent drinker, smoker, and gambler with crippling angst and self-doubt, but I didn't raise a quitter."

He smirked. "You didn't raise me at all. I was programmed this way."

I motioned toward the pile of bones nearby. "This is your 'abuela,' Shaun. Don't you think she deserves better than a shallow grave?"

"She lived here all her life. I'm sure she was aware of the nature of this terrain. I think she would understand."

I hopped into the hole and found it to be a little more than waist-deep. "Alright," I relented. "Bring 'er 'round."

With her arranged as lovingly as we could manage in our hole, we began to fill it back in. Felina came out holding Rosalita about the time we were almost done. "There's my boys."

Dripping with sweat, we both gave her a weak nod as we continued to shovel dirt.

Her eyes looked me up and down, and that lustful smile I am ever-so familiar with crept across her face. "That's a good look for you, querido."

"What? Sweaty and shirtless?"

"Yep…in the desert… and so strong…" She grinned harder. "Now all you need is a cowboy hat."

I chuckled. "We'll see."

"I got some food ready if you boys want to take a break." She headed back around the side of the house.

"Was mom just hitting on you at abuela's gravesite?" Shaun let his shovel drop to the ground. "Now, who's morally bankrupt?"

"Don't blame her, son." I leaned my shovel against the fence post and draped my coat over my arm. "It's probably still the hormones."

Just then, we heard her shout from around the corner, "Is this a dirty diaper in the bushes?!"

Shaun looked questioningly at me.

"Damn. Forgot about that."


	6. You Turn the Screws

It became more and more apparent to me that Felina intended for us to live in the decrepit, old house she grew up in. Overall, it was in worse shape than our home back in Sanctuary, but she assured me that the Commonwealth house had started out much worse before she started fixing it up, and that she could do it again. On the upside, this one had one bedroom more than our old house. That would mean Shaun and Rosalita could each have their own room…

Except we still had Ambrosia with us.

But I wasn't complaining. She was in love with the baby and quickly falling into the role of "nanny." I had no intention of pawning my child off on an outsider, but I could see having an extra hand helping out being potentially very useful. It takes a village and all that garbage. I wasn't going to chase her off as long as she was still being the doting, affectionate, ex-midwife's apprentice and not the Children of Atom fringe lunatic she was when I first met her.

The location of the humble ranch house was conveniently close enough to Freeside, and later that day, everyone was up for giving it a visit.

As we came through one of Freeside's gates, we were immediately greeted by a man dressed vaguely like an Atom Cat trying to hustle us into hiring him as our "bodyguard." I looked over at Felina as I reached towards my boot, my fingertips grazing the handle of my knife. "This guy bothering you?"

"No, John! ¿Cual es tu…?" She waved to the guy, continuing past him. "We're good, thanks."

I pushed on with a playful shrug, knowing damn well the guy wasn't a real threat, but I also knew how much Felina loved that knife... "Ya know I would have taken care of him if you wanted me to."

"I know, querido," she said with a smile. "I know."

Ambrosia gave me a sideways look. "Please don't shank anyone. At least not until after I get some answers about the current political weather."

"Aw, you're no fun."

Freeside was a community fenced in by scrap and junk to keep the feral creatures of the wastes out, and ultimately trapping the equally feral people of the wastes in to thrive as the independent, free-spirited scum and drifters that people become when left to their own devices with very little resources and an abundance of chems.

It felt like home.

"Does Freeside need a mayor?" I asked Ambrosia, only half-joking.

"Freeside isn't exactly a democracy. At least not last time I was here."

"You could say I have experience with this. I could easily organize this town and offer them protection and guidance…"

"This town already has a pimp, Hancock." She stopped and opened a large wooden gate. "C'mon."

Inside, there were people rushing around and helping obvious drifters and junkies with real problems. Dr. Amari never had it this bad in Goodneighbor. "This those humanitarians you were talking about?"

Even she looked a bit astonished as she soaked up everything around us. "Uh, yeah. The Followers of the Apocalypse. It was never this busy before, though. I wonder if something happened."

She led us to a tent where a woman with a mohawk was speaking to a blonde fella with glasses, both in lab coats. "Julie…?"

The woman turned to face her, her own expression overcome with astonishment. "Amy?"

"What's going on? Was there some kind of disaster?"

"Nope," she said, already beginning to scurry off. "It's like this every day. I know it's been a while –

"Seven years."

"But I'm needed elsewhere. We'll have to catch up later."

She turned to the guy. "And what about you, Arcade? You gonna skip out, too?"

"No. You know I've never been one to get hands on with people. Research only." He folded his arms. "Never thought I'd see you again. Figured all that radiation on the Long 15 finally did you in."

"You should know it's not that easy to get rid of me."

"Clearly," he said with some cattiness. "It certainly took its toll on you, though."

I leaned toward her in an aside. "You bang this guy, too?"

I thought I was being discreet, but his chuckle indicated otherwise.

Ambrosia's simultaneous chuckle sounded a bit uneasy. "No. Not for lack of trying, though…" she remarked.

"Amy's not my type," he declared dryly.

"Yeah," Ambrosia added with a playful grin. "Arcade's a 'confirmed bachelor'."

He shook his head in amusement while repeating my banging question under his breath. "So I take it you guys must have come across Benny somewhere in your travels?"

Felina and I exchanged a confused glance. "No…"

That hidden temper of Ambrosia's reared its ugly head for the second time since we had entered this region. "You should probably clam up before you make me do something I regret!"

Arcade rolled his eyes. "Like what? Are you going to drop a nuclear bomb on the Old Mormon Fort, too?"

Ambrosia's eye was twitching with anger. "For your information, they were missiles, not bombs –"

He waved dismissively. "Same thing."

"And that had nothing to do with Boone and everything to do with the NCR."

"Whatever you say, courier."

She took a deep breath. "Look, I didn't come here looking for a fight…"

"That's good, since I'm probably one of the few people in the Mojave who isn't scared of you."

I exchanged another glance with my wife. Against my better instincts, I had put my faith in her judge of character, but I was really starting to wonder how harmless Ambrosia really was.

Ambrosia thankfully ignored his snide remark. "I spoke with Boone back at the dam and he said Yes Man is running things…"

"Correct."

"…But without someone running him."

"Also correct."

"So how did that happen?"

"How much do you already know?"

"That's all of it. Boone and I didn't have much to say to each other."

He grimaced. "Not surprising. Well, after you disappeared, Veronica and Boone formed that alliance between the NCR and the Brotherhood that you kept trying to prevent and proceeded with the assault on Hoover Dam, where they officially drove the Legion away. Afterwards, Yes Man informed them that he found pieces of code within House's mainframe to upgrade him, and he went offline for a while. While he was gone, Veronica and Boone fought over who was going to lead New Vegas –"

"Seriously? I didn't think either one of them wanted to lead."

"They didn't. They were fighting over which one them would have to step up. Neither one of them wanted to. In the end, it didn't matter, because when Yes Man booted back up, he was basically House Jr. It would appear that he was meant to find the code as a fail-safe implemented by House to ensure that New Vegas would continue as he planned in the event of his death. So good news, mailman. Turns out, it didn't matter that you petered out when you did."

"So… I killed House for nothing?"

"So it would seem."

"I shouldn't have- I should have been there. Maybe if I had taken responsibility for Yes Man –"

"Please. Don't lose any sleep over that one. There's nothing you could have done. Even if he was _your_ Yes Man and not Boone's or Veronica's, he still would have rebooted the same as he is now. If you want to feel guilty about something, you should feel bad about that NCR outpost."

"Never! They are nothing but a bunch of icky bullies that write checks their asses can't cash!"

I was just barely following this conversation, knowing as little as I did about the parties involved.

Felina, ever more sober than I am, was having an easier time with it. "So if the Brotherhood and the NCR had formed an alliance, why did the NCR leave the Mojave?"

"Excellent question," he said, turning a chiding eye to Ambrosia. "After everything with Yes Man was said and done, the Brotherhood turned on the NCR. As it happens, the outpost that was bombed by a _certain courier_ weakened them enough that the Brotherhood saw it as an opportunity to assert their dominance and reclaim the area."

Rosalita was starting to get restless in Felina's arms, but she merely began to bounce her a little, still engrossed by Arcade's knowledge. "Why didn't this 'Yes Man' do something about it?"

"Yes Man could care less about what happens outside of The Strip as long as he still has control of the dam. Even if the Brotherhood had continued to work with the NCR to try and take it from him, they wouldn't have been able to defeat the securitrons that Amy upgraded when she was still halfway invested in the movement for a free New Vegas." He paused to glare at her yet again. "The NCR has wasted enough resources and suffered enough losses in this territory, so when the BoS grew a new pair – something to do with a guy of theirs on the East Coast getting their _shit_ together – NCR cut their losses and let them have it."

His words became increasingly bitter the more he spoke about it, and I had a feeling I knew why. "I take it you don't care much for the Brotherhood?"

"Given a choice between the two, I was more partial to the NCR, but when the BoS drove them away out of pure greed, that was all I needed to cement my negative feelings towards them."

"I feel ya. I'm not familiar with the NCR, but I'm not much of a fan of the Brotherhood."

"I can't imagine you would be. The NCR had a more enlightened attitude about ghouls. You probably would have liked them."

Ambrosia scoffed. "No offense, Arcade, but I've known Hancock here a little longer than the five minutes you have, and I'm fairly certain he wouldn't have cared for the NCR."

He narrowed his eyes at her. "I guess we'll never know, will we?"

Rosalita's whimpering was on the cusp of a tantrum. "Shhh,hija…" Felina looked pleadingly over at Ambrosia. "Is there somewhere I can…?"

"Arcade, is Dina still around?"

"Yeah. Same tent and everything."

Ambrosia waved her on. "Follow me. I'll take you to meet the midwife."

I patted Shaun on the back. "Why don't you go with your mom?"

"Weren't you paying attention? Mom's going to go feed the baby."

"Just… you and Dogmeat go play. I want to talk to Arcade for a minute."

He looked at me cross as he sulked off. "Fine."

"So," I said to Arcade once Shaun was gone, "you guys are, what, doctors?"

"We do offer basic medical services, but supplies are scarce and patients are at an all-time high now that the Strip is booming, so we mainly deal in emergencies. If you need minor medical care, we would prefer you go to Dr. Usanagi's clinic. It's not far."

"Right, scarce supplies, got it. I was looking for more of something along the lines of medical knowledge. Can ya spare summa that?"

"Sure." He laughed lightly. "I won't even charge you this time. First one's free."

"Okay." He was so dry, I couldn't tell if he was joking. "How long after childbirth should a mother wait to start having sex again if she's feeling some... discomfort?"

"Discomfort is normal in even the best case scenario. Four to six weeks. Longer if there's an episiotomy or tear. Bare minimum of two weeks before any vaginal penetration what-so-ever, though, or else there's a risk of bleeding or infection. But come on, that wasn't even a hard one. Amy could have told you that." He turned back to his work. "I'm sure Felina could have just as easily told you. Judging by the ten year old that just called her 'mom,' she's obviously given birth before."

I was a little stunned. "He's twelve," I said distractedly.

"He's awfully small for a twelve year old…"

I hardly heard what he just said. "So that four to six weeks thing? That's common knowledge for mothers, then?"

"Yeah. If you have any more questions about pregnancy and childbirth, Dina would be more than happy to answer those for you. That's not really my thing."

Just then, Ambrosia returned. "Felina was asking for you," she said to me.

I was still fuming a bit at the realization that she willing putting herself in harm's way in her attempt to have sex the night before, but I wasn't about to make a scene in public. "Lead the way then."

She pointed to a tent across the courtyard. "She's over there. I'd like to talk to Arcade for a minute, if you don't mind."

One side of his lip curled. "I'm so popular, today. I can hardly contain myself."

I composed myself and left them for Felina.

* * *

Still pulling from her pre-war experiences, whether she meant to or not, Felina found that taking Rosalita around the wasteland was a bigger burden than she had anticipated, so when Ambrosia had finished her business, we collectively decided to head back to the ranch.

Once we had returned, I asked Felina to come talk to me in private.

"Sure, querido." She placed Rosalita in the stroller and turned to Ambrosia. "Do you mind watching her for a minute?"

She grinned warmly as she took the handles. "You don't even have to ask."

I was standing rigidly just inside the bedroom when Felina pulled the door shut behind her. "What's on your mind?"

"Four to six weeks."

"What?"

"Don't act like this is news to you. I asked Arcade how long you should wait to have sex, and he said four to six weeks."

"What does he know? He's not an ob/gyn."

Never taking my eyes off hers, I reached beside her for the doorknob and cracked the door open. "Ambrosia!"

"Yes?"

"How long should Felina wait to have sex?"

"Four to six weeks."

I just kept giving Felina the same narrow-eyed stare as I pushed the door shut once more.

She mouthed the word "fuck" as though I wouldn't notice. "That's not a hard and fast rule, querido. Sometimes there's tearing, but Rosalita was born early, and she's actually very small…"

"Not compared to what I usually put it you."

She swept her hand in front of her. "That's not what I'm trying to say –"

"All I'm trying to say is you knew, and I didn't. That wasn't fucking cool, Felina. Bare minimum two weeks, and you were trying to seduce me twenty-four hours later…"

"Not that it's hard to seduce _you_! All I gotta do is wiggle my ass a little bit, maybe shake my tits."

"Come on, Felina, you know that ain't fair! I _love_ you! If you ain't enjoying it, I ain't enjoying it. And I ain't trying to cause you internal bleeding just to get off real quick. "

"We had to wait so long during the pregnancy, though, I just… I don't want to wait anymore."

"It's just a couple weeks, alright? I ain't mad, but you should have told me. That's all. I wouldn't have been able to forgive myself if I hurt you."

She buried her head in my chest, and I put my arms around her. "I'm sorry, querido. Really. I didn't think about it like that."

"It's fine, love. Besides…" I reached a finger under her chin and tilted her face toward mine. "There's still other things I can do for you…" I leaned in and gave her a tender kiss.

"Mmm," she moaned as our lips parted from each other. "You're right. There is."

A devilish smile crossed my face. "What shall I do for my love, first?"

She reached past me for a book that was lying on the dresser and shoved it into my chest. "You can start by thumbing through this with Shaun and getting that hot water heater working."

I looked down at the book and immediately recognized it as the repair manual Sturges had pieced together for us as a going-away present.

"Mama's gonna want a hot shower later."

My smile grew lazy as I thought back to our shower back in Sanctuary. "And daddy wants you to have that shower," I said as I exited the room.


	7. Heartaches By the Numbers

I wasn't going to argue with her anymore. I had said my piece, and she knew how I felt, so that's how you do it, right? Communication… and sacrifices…

Marriage and parenthood are a downright deadly combination, but I'm a survivor.

I found Shaun outside, idly throwing a stick while Dogmeat would chase after it. "Hey, killer. Hope you didn't have anything important planned."

His face reflected a sense of aggravation in anticipation of what I was about to ask. "No," he replied flatly as he took the stick from Dogmeat with a reassuring pat, letting it drop between them. "What's up?"

"Your mom would like us to get started on a few repairs around the house."

His eyes glazed over. "It was just yesterday she was assuring us that she would do it."

"You need to lighten up, kid. She just had a baby. You and I both know she's capable of building an entire settlement on her own, but that doesn't mean she should have to. She always pulled more than her own weight back in the Commonwealth, but things are going to be different here, alright?"

…

…

…

"For fuck's sake, Shaun. Did you really just roll your eyes at me?"

I snapped my focus forward again and glared at dad. "Yes. I did."

"Ya know I'm a huge advocate of 'party or die,' son, but sometimes, ya gotta roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Have I completely failed to make that clear this far?"

"A little bit, yeah."

Dad's face grew serious. "Well, we're gonna have to rectify that." He unexpectedly tossed a book at me, and I fumbled to catch it. "First thing's first. We're gonna fix the hot water heater."

I took a look at the structurally unsound building we were basically squatting in as I considered his words. "Yeah, that sounds like it should be the top priority alright."

"What's gotten into you? I can't help but notice ya been extra sassy here lately."

"Sassy?" _What a crap-sounding word._

"I realize the last few months have been a huge hassle, and I don't like it any more than you do, but we gotta get some things in order around here before we can just settle in and relax. This ain't really my thing, and I'm gonna need your help. I can't understand half the shit in that book, but _you_ can."

I opened it to a random page and observed the hand-drawn schematics for a generator. I knew how to read stuff like that a little bit, but this was particularly difficult for me to comprehend in all its hastily-written glory. Glancing up at the windmill, I thought to myself how relieved I was that we weren't going to have to build a damn generator. I flipped a few more pages over until I found something about water heaters. "Alright. So where is the water heater?"

He shrugged. "You tell me. I ain't even sure I know what one looks like."

* * *

We still had the tank disconnected and pieces scattered all around us when the sun started to set.

Mom came to check on us wearing rubber gloves up to her elbows and carrying a bucket. "How's it coming?"

"Not good," dad replied in a worn-out, defeated tone.

She held the bucket up. "Can you at least turn the water main back on long enough for me to refill this? I've only got the kitchen about half clean."

I frowned. "No. Not with the tank disconnected like this. It'll flood the house."

"Good," she said sarcastically. "Then I won't have to clean the floors. Seriously, there should be a separate valve for that tank. You shouldn't have had to turn off the entire house's water to do this."

"You're right, mom. Shouldn't have had to… if whoever built this house had installed the plumbing right. It's probably why no one has bothered to move in here in the past 200-something years."

"I don't believe you." She started looking around the tiny closet we were squeezed in. "How can you even see anything in here? It's dark as shit…" She reached up and pulled a chain on a lightbulb hanging over our heads, and it came on briefly, but immediately started to flicker. She continued searching for the non-existent water heater valve. "There's got to be one around here somewhere."

"I'm telling you, there's not. We wasted plenty of time looking before we got started."

She sighed. "Any chance you're going to get this thing finished tonight so I can at least shower?"

Just then, the light over our heads flickered out and didn't come back on, along with all the lights in the rest of the house.

I tossed the pipe I was holding against the wall in frustration. "Not a damn chance."

Mom's Spanish swearing faded as she moved down the hall in the dark. Then the baby started crying and Ambrosia called for her.

I flipped my pip-boy light on and dug myself out of the pile of hardware I was buried in.

The shadows on dad's face darkened as it twisted into a grimace. "Where are you going?"

"I give up, dad. We don't have the right parts or the right tools, and things in this house are way more messed up than we can handle on our own."

He sighed as he stood up. "C'mon, kid. I'm gonna take a smoke break."

We went to our usual spot by abuela's grave, and he didn't say crap to me as I lit one up beside him, something I hadn't been bold enough to do while mom was still awake.

He took a long, laborious drag. "Let's just call it a night. After some sleep, you'll feel better about it in the morning."

"No, dad, I won't. You are relying on me to guide you through the repair process, and I can't do it. This is beyond my skill set. I work mainly with computers and weapons. I'm not a damn carpenter or electrician or plumber. And neither is mom. You and I both know Sturges did most of that stuff for her back in Sanctuary."

"That's why he gave us the book."

I exhaled roughly. "It's just too much. I learned a lot from watching him, but it was all light repairs. I'm not prepared to completely rebuild a whole house."

He looked up at the nearly-full moon hanging low in the dusky night sky. "So what do you suggest, Shaun?"

His tone indicated it was more of a rhetorical question, but I couldn't let it go. "We should settle somewhere else."

"You know we can't do that. Your mom won't have it."

"Well that's just plain stupid. She already had us walk all the way across the country to be here, and now she's going to be petty about which house we live in while we're here? We had it good back in the Commonwealth, and she disrupted our entire lives to make us pick up roots and leave all that behind. There's no reason she should keep getting her way."

"You don't get it, do you, Shaun? I agree, we left behind a good thing to come here, but if we only half-ass it, then it really ain't worth it. We're gonna see this thing through to the end."

"Why? Why do we have to keep bending over backwards for only _her_ happiness? What about ours?"

"Her happiness makes me happy." He took a deep breath and his whole tone became notably gentle. "Don't forget how much of her life she lost in the blink of an eye when the bombs fell, and so far, she's been pretty cool about it. If there's a little part of it, like this house, that she wants to hang onto, then it really ain't gonna hurt us to make that happen for her… What about you? What's gonna make you happy?"

"Going back in time and never having left the Commonwealth. This whole journey here sucked, and I wish it never happened."

"So you were happy the way things were up until we left Sanctuary?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure about that?"

 _What the heck is he getting at?_ "Yes, I'm sure."

"I remember hearing at one point you told your mom you wished she had left you at the Institute, though. So apparently you got past that. And you'll get past this, too."

"That was different, dad."

"How?"

"…I thought you were dead."

"Well, I ain't." He thumped his cigarette to the ground. "So, barring time travel, what would make you happy now?"

"I don't know," I kicked my toe into the dirt, "but not this."

"Well, keep me posted." He patted me on the back and began to walk back to the house. "Your happiness matters to me, too, but I don't know what you want if ya don't tell me."

I stayed outside on my own for a while, still too frustrated and angry to deal with the others just yet. When I finally came back in, everyone was sitting around an oil lamp in the living room, speaking in hushed tones.

Mom turned to me and made the _shush_ gesture over her lips. "I just got Rosalita to sleep," she told me in a whisper.

Dogmeat and I joined the circle cross-legged on the floor without a word.

"So it's settled, then," dad said. "Ambrosia and I will head out first thing in the morning to find Raul."

"Who's Raul?" I asked.

Ambrosia turned to me. "He's the best repairman in the Mojave."

 _Oh, good. The desert Sturges._ "I want to go, too."

Dad shook his head. "Someone needs to stay here with Felina."

"Then one of _you_ stay, and I'll go."

Ambrosia gave me that overly-diplomatic smile of hers. "It's too dangerous, little one."

"No, it's not!"

Everyone went _shhh_ at once.

"Keep your voice down, hijo."

Dad was rubbing his brow in an uncharacteristic manner. I could tell his patience with me was wearing thin. "Shaun, you're staying here and helping your mom out, and that's that."

"Why? That's not f-"

"Dammit, Shaun, because I said so. You know I hate being like that, so for the love of god, please just…" He didn't finish. Instead he got up and walked outside.

Mom glared at me. "What did you do?! He never snaps at you like that."

"Nothing, I swear!"

With that, Rosalita began to whimper.

Mom sighed and rushed back to her stroller in the bedroom, leaving me alone with Ambrosia.

The frail-looking woman gazed at me with warmth. "I know what it's like," she told me.

"Please," I replied sarcastically. "I don't need some insincere lesson of personal experience on how my parents don't love me any less now that there's a new baby. I'm too old for that crap."

She smiled again. "I know you are. That's not what I'm talking about. I know what it's like to be your age and feel …different... It's the synth thing, isn't it?"

She actually had my attention at that point. "What could you possibly understand about that?"

"Well, I'm not a synth, but I've always had… identity issues. I know it's not the same, but I can definitely relate. Before, you asked me why Boone called me 'mailman'?"

"Arcade did, too."

"Well, I've worn a lot of hats, trying to find myself. It's why I became a courier in the first place… To leave the place where I was born, wander around, figure things out on my own."

I scoffed, thinking about how she was basically a Children of Atom terrorist when we picked her up. "How'd that work out for you?"

"I don't know if anyone ever figures themselves out completely, but it did help me learn a lot about myself. Learn what my priorities are, what I'm capable of, develop convictions –which I had none of before."

"So what are you saying? That I should become a mailman?"

She chuckled. "No, what I'm trying to tell you is that things are never as bad as you think they are. Instead of dwelling on everything that you think is wrong, you should dwell on what's right. Accept that things are never going to be perfect. Instead of hating who you are, love who you could become and be that person."

_Easy for her to say. She wasn't a synth, or a child, nor did she even manage to get her life together…_

"I never did get it entirely together," she said, as though she could read my thoughts, "but if you knew me back then, you'd know that I've made huge steps in the right direction, against all odds. You know what else? So has your mom and your dad. Even if you weren't a synth, there would be some other obstacle in your path. No one gets off that easy… Well, maybe some do, but I have more respect for people like ya'll that have managed to make it through all the muck and come out okay on the other side."

I thought about what she was saying for a moment before commenting. "Okay, so mom had to deal with the whole adjusting to the post-war life very suddenly, and dad has that whole ghoul thing. I get that…"

"Which is why you should be more respectful towards them."

"But what about you? What odds were you up against?"

She held a finger to her temple and mocked pulling a trigger. "I was shot in the head, for one."

I felt my brow curl involuntarily. "That, uh…that sucks."

"And it wasn't in some gunslinging fight or brawl. Some people wanted me dead… just for doing my job. As a courier. But I survived, and I tracked that bastard down."

"Did you kill him?"

"Not exactly…" Dad chose that moment to come back in, and Ambrosia stood up. "I'm going to head to bed."

"But I want to hear what happened next."

She ruffled my hair as she passed me. "Maybe some other time. I have to get some sleep."

Once she was gone, dad addressed me. "What were you two talking about?"

"Nothing, really."

He suddenly came over and put his arms around me. "I'm sorry for snapping at you earlier."

I wasn't expecting that. "It's okay."

"No, it ain't. I had to take a moment outside to think about why I'm mad at ya. I'm mad at ya for being too much like me." He let go and took a step back, looking me up and down.

That was confusing. "But I… I love you, dad. Why wouldn't I want to be like you?"

"Because, you ain't me. The smoking and the sass… this brooding attitude you've had lately that I had when I was your age…you're so willing to run head first into danger, and too quick to run from your family. That ain't the kind of shit I wanted you to learn. You have a brighter future than that ahead of ya. You're smart and talented. I don't want you to throw all of that away. Not because of me…"

"But you didn't –"

"And I'm scared, Shaun," he interrupted. "Now there's Rosalita, too. I'm scared I'm gonna fuck both of you up."

"You're not fucking me up, dad."

He smiled. "Nah, of course not. You're too smart to let that happen, ain't ya?"

I returned his smile. "Right."

"So let me start over. Will you please stay here with your mom? It's the right thing to do."

"Sure."

His grin widened as he turned away. "I'll see you in the morning."

I snuffed out the oil lamp. "At abuela's grave?"

He sighed as he walked down the hall. "Good night, son."


	8. Red Right Hand

Mom didn't need my help with the baby. With Rosalita almost always hanging from her teat, there wasn't much I could do anyhow. She spent the first day dad and Ambrosia were gone cleaning while I reassembled the water heater tank so we could at least have running water. The following couple days, I repaired the fence out back.

The afternoon I finished the fence, mom casually remarked that now we could keep a few brahmin, so Dogmeat and I used the rest of the daylight wrangling some of the wild brahmin nearby into the new fence. It was much easier in theory than in practice. Turns out wild brahmin are not as friendly as domestic are, but we managed.

The next day, she wheeled Rosalita's stroller outside while she set up a garden with some seeds she had brought with her. I helped her with that for a while, but a ways in, she put me to task going off to look for peppers. I brought her back as many as I could find, and she added some to the garden, bringing the rest inside to hang in the kitchen.

I quickly exhausted any projects there were for me to pick up within only a few days, there wasn't a whole lot to do around the house. We would occasionally try practicing our instruments, but it was almost always interrupted by Rosalita's hungry cries.

I had a few games that mom gave me to play on my pip-boy, but I quickly lost interest in that. The old me probably would have enjoyed them more, but everything felt like such a waste of time these days. I was always anxiously waiting for something I felt like was supposed to happen, but I literally had no idea what it was. I just knew I needed to be doing something. Something productive. I was also unclear what exactly my personal definition of "productive" was.

"Mom, do you care if I go to Freeside, today?"

Rosalita was fussing while being bounced on her knee. "No way, hijo. That place is too rough."

"Well, I mean, not Freeside exactly. The Old Mormon Fort where the doctors are."

"What for?"

"See what there is to see. It's not that rough, mom. It's not that far, either. You dragged me all the way across the country through all kinds of danger. You know I can handle myself."

Rosalita's fussing was getting louder. "I don't know, hijo…"

"Not to mention after all that, being cooped up in this house is pretty boring. I need some friends, here."

She sighed. "Just make sure you're back plenty before dark."

I was already heading out the door, thankful to be getting away from the screeching of my little sister. "Sure thing, mom."

"Make sure you bring protection."

I picked up my laser rifle on the way out. "Way ahead of you."

As Dogmeat and I trounced briskly through the golden sands and sparse vegetation of the desert towards Freeside's junk gate, my eyes were drawn to the flashy casino signs hovering in the distant sky above, and I thought back to the game in that prairie town where those guys had a good laugh over taking all my caps. That's when I knew what I was going to do. I was going to improve my poker strategy.

Once inside, I looked around me at the degenerates littering the streets. The same men as before were standing just inside, trying to peddle their bodyguard services.

"Hey, kid! I remember you," said the one man not wearing a leather jacket. "You were here with the ghoul and the Mexican broad the other day. Whaddya say? Since you're on your own, you could probably use some backup."

"Are you kidding me?" I said cockily, palming my laser rifle. "I was going to ask you if you needed _me_ to protect _you_."

The man chuckled. "Get a loada this guy," he remarked to the others. He leaned down to me, his hands on his knees. "That rifle is as big as you. Can you even shoot that thing?"

Without a word, I slung the barrel upward and shot a passing rat straight between the eyes. Two kids jumped up from the curb and ran to it, excitedly tearing into its flesh and thanking me.

_Ugh, really?_ I curled my lip in disgust.

The men by the gate laughed heartily. "You're alright, kid."

"Yeah. I know." I holstered my weapon and continued down the street past the Fort.

As I neared the Strip's gate, I was approached by one of those one-wheeled securitrons with the screen for a face. "Submit to a credit check or present your passport before proceeding to the gate. Trespassers will be shot."

I puffed my chest up with the same confidence that I had used on the bodyguards. "Robot, let me past!"

The securitron and two others behind him poised for an attack. "Admission to the Strip requires an official passport or proof that you are carrying the required minimum balance."

I was sure it was going to give me a hard time about being a kid, but I was surprised to see that didn't make a difference. "What's the required minimum balance?"

"2000 caps."

"I… I don't have that."

"Please return when you have sufficient caps or a passport." The robot guard didn't stand down until I began to back away. I had no idea what I was going to do. It was somewhat of a relief to see that being a kid didn't matter if you had enough caps, but getting my hands on that many seemed impossible.

A man smoking a cigarette nearby had seen the whole thing. "Gonna hit it big on the Strip, huh?" he remarked as he neared me.

"Doesn't look like it. I figured I could make a few caps there, but they won't even let you in without a ridiculous amount of caps to begin with. That seems kind of backwards, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," he said as he exhaled his smoke. "That's how they get ya."

"He said something about a passport. How do I get one of those?"

"You can buy one at Mick and Ralph's. It's much easier on your wallet than the 2000 cap credit check, but it still isn't cheap." He gave me directions to Mick and Ralph's, and Dogmeat and I headed that way.

A little bell hanging over the door dinged as we entered the shop, and the man at the counter looked down at me with amusement. "You lost, kid?"

I was coming to expect everyone calling me "kid" and thinking the stuff I did was entertaining, but that didn't mean I was okay with it. I had the same kinds of frustrations before I found out I was going to be small forever, but it was easier to not let it get you down when you knew one day you'd grow up.

Since that was an impossibility for me, I couldn't let it faze me. I had to find a way to overcome it. It's like the point dad was trying to make about those bigots back in that one-brahmin prairie town. You just have to prove their biases wrong.

"No, I'm trying to obtain a passport, and I heard I could get one here."

"Mick's got some guns for sale, and I have some general supplies, but I only offer passport services if the King gives the okay. Tell your pops or whoever it's for to impress him and then we can talk."

"It's for me," I said as I approached the counter and looked over its edge at him with sternness, "and I was told I could just buy one."

He chuckled to himself. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"C'mon. A resourceful fellow such as yourself _must_ have something on the side."

He chuckle d again. "You're a riot, kid, you know that? Yeah, okay. I'll sell you a passport. 500 caps."

"¡Puta madre! No way your materials and expenses require that!"

"Ha! I like your style, but the best I can do is 375 caps. We got a deal?"

"Nah, forget it. That's a fucking rip off."

"I get it. A kid like you doesn't have that kind of fundage. I never do this for anyone, but I like your grit. 200. Take it or leave it."

My fingers nervously twiddled the little bit of caps I had in my pocket. I didn't have that much. Even if I did, that would leave me no money to gamble with. "Well, this was a bust," I mumbled drearily as I turned away.

"200 is a steal, kid. I'm not going to make you that deal again."

"You do what you gotta," I told him as I exited the building.

Back in the street, I looked down at Dogmeat. "What now?"

He barked and took off around a corner. I ran after him through the streets, seeing him stop up ahead in front of a building that said "School of Impressions" down the side. When I caught up to where he had planted his butt, I noticed the guitar-shaped sign over the door said "The Kings."

I smiled as I gave his head a rub. "Good thinking, boy!"

Everyone turned to us when we walked in. I noticed they were all dressed in the same leather jackets as the bodyguards hustling the gate.

A man leaning casually by a closed door addressed me first. "What do we have here?" His accent was similar to the regional one way back on the other side of the Mississippi River.

Dogmeat and I approached him. "I'd like to see the King if possible."

"Anything's possible, I suppose. How much is it worth to you to see the big man?"

"I'm new in town and wanted to pay my respects."

The man smiled. "That's the spirit." He looked down at my shirt – the same black and white striped one I always wear – and I realized he was wearing a similar shirt and jeans under his leather jacket. "Ya know what? I like you. You've got class _and_ style." He stepped aside and held the door for me. "Why don't you head on back."

The room was spacious with café tables scattered around in front of a stage. A man with perfectly-styled, dark hair and a white jacket was sitting in the very front, looking with boredom at the act behind the microphone. I walked up beside him and politely asked, "Are you the King?"

"Yes, that's me." He had the same Southern drawl as the man guarding the room. As he turned to face me, his eyes darted to Dogmeat and his whole demeanor perked up. "That's a mighty fine dog you got there."

"I'm Shaun, and this is Dogmeat," I told him in the automatic introduction I'd given countless times before. "He's my best friend."

"Mind if I pet him?"

"No, please do."

He rubbed the dog's ear as he panted happily. "I had a dog like that once," he told me, the energy draining from his voice once more. "Rexie, poor boy. I kept him around as long as I could, but the fever eventually took him."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I responded with absolute sincerity. Of all the morose thoughts I'd been having, my own pet's longevity was not something I had even considered. Now I had something new to worry about…

"Did everything I could for him. He had some augmentations that were going bad or something."

"Augmentations? On a dog? I didn't know you could do that."

"Sure you can. Can keep a dog going almost indefinitely, if you find the right 'parts' and the right people to do it. Yep, poor old Rexie, he was a good boy." He patted Dogmeat's head with finality. "Was there something I could do for you?"

I took a seat in the chair next to him. "I'm trying to earn either enough caps or a passport to get on the Strip."

"What in the world would you do on the Strip?"

"Make more caps."

He let out a friendly chuckle. "I admire your ingenuity, but gambling is no way to make caps, son. You should forget about the Strip. What do you need all that money for anyhow?"

"Just… just trying to build up my savings. Plan for the future and all that. Sir."

"I suppose that's an admirable cause. I've certainly heard worse in my day."

"Is it possible you have some work for me?"

He laughed again. "Not much around here for a young man such as yourself. You have any interest in sweeping hair up in the barbershop?"

"Not that kind of work, Mr. King. I'm a, uh, a gun for hire." I patted the rifle by my side. "I was hoping you'd have something a little more lucrative for me like those thugs at the gate offering body guard services."

He looked at me incredulously. "You want to be a bodyguard?"

"I'm a crack shot, sir."

He smiled. "And so polite, too. Tell you what. I'm not sure you'll be able to pull off a job like that with no reputation to speak of. People are just going to see you as a kid."

I scoffed. "Believe me, I know. The struggle is real."

"But I may be able to help you build a bit of a reputation, and we'll see about working your way up to some more dangerous assignments, if you truly have the guff."

"You'd do that for me?"

"That I will, Shaun. You've got a very likeable disposition. And great taste in companions," he remarked, giving Dogmeat a subtle grin. "I think you're going to fit in around here just fine."

"So what should I do first?"

"Since a lack of rep is part of your problem at the moment, you can use that to your advantage to help me with a little issue. Those bodyguards you were asking about, they used to make a killing back when House ran the Strip and Freeside was less stable. The only one of them that still makes any real caps nowadays is a fellow named Orris." He pulled out a couple hundred caps and handed them over to me. "I want you to hire him. Get the tour. Find out why he's so popular. He's the only one not dressed like us, so you'll know him when you see him."

I could already tell this was going to be a problem. I knew exactly who he was talking about. He's the one I was showing off to earlier.

"Do a good job on this, and I'll see what else I can scrounge up for you."


	9. Paper Planes

Reluctantly, I left the Kings building and headed back to the gate.

The hired guns were already eyeballing me as I came towards them. I could see Orris's smirk from all the way down the street. "Well if it isn't the little deadeye," he remarked as I came his way.

"I changed my mind," I told him once I was close enough. "I think I could use some help getting around town."

"What made you change your tune?" he asked suspiciously.

"This place is a little rougher than I had anticipated."

His smirk disappeared. "500 caps," he replied.

He must have known something was up since he jacked his price up on me. "That seems awfully steep, mister."

"Go shoot some more rats then, kid, and quit wasting my time."

"Look, I just need to get safely to the Strip. If I pay you 500 caps, I won't have enough left to pass the credit check."

"What business does a toddler like you have on the Strip, anyhow?"

"Do you want my caps or not?"

"Not." He was already looking past me. "Now get out of here. You're chasing off my real customers."

* * *

Dogmeat and I slinked off to a distant alley where I sat down to think. "Know what, boy? I could take this 200 caps and go get that passport from Ralph…"

As Dogmeat whimpered to show his distaste for that idea, dad's words about me knowing right from wrong echoed in my head. "Yeah, you're right. So what _should_ I do?"

Just then, I heard voices approaching. Dogmeat and I ducked behind some rubble and I listened intently.

"Orris has another tourist en route. Take your positions."

Four men posted up in the shadows nearby and waited quietly until footfalls from the main road grew louder. I watched in paralyzed silence as the four men came out and attacked Orris and the tourist. Orris put them down promptly, talking up his prowess once the danger was passed. I heard the tourist commenting on how grateful he was for hiring him as they continued on down the alleyways.

"Holy crap," I whispered to Dogmeat as we came out of hiding. I glanced around real quick to see if there was anyone else coming before running to one of the bodies, intent on scavenging. Hey, it's one of the best ways to get caps and valuables.

As I reached in the man's pocket, his eyes popped open. "What are you doing?!" he exclaimed, springing up.

I jumped back in shock. "Nothing…"

One of the other guys started to get up as well, already beginning to reach for his gun. "Did that kid see the whole thing?"

_Shit!_ Giving them no time to get the jump on me, I flung my laser rifle ahead and fired at the two guys that had blown their "pretend dead" cover, taking them out for real this time.

By then, I was coming under fire from the last two men. I dove for the rubble Dogmeat and I were previously hiding behind and shot it out with them. One of them blew a hole in my Minuteman tricorn, and I felt a fury rise up. "That was a gift, you son of a bitch!" My whole world slowed to a crawl as I stood up from my cover and turned him into Swiss cheese.

The last guy nearly peed his pants as he made a big production of tossing away his empty 9mm before taking off down the alley. I dropped to one knee and steadied my aim, gazing calmly through the sights and trailing him. Taking a deep breath and holding it, I squeezed the trigger one last time, sending a laser through the center of his skull. The heat spread through him, and he disintegrated into a glowing red pile of dust.

"Pieces of shit," I mumbled to myself as I took my hat off, examining the damage with a single finger through the hole. "Dogmeat, go see if they have anything good on them." I replaced my hat and dug into my pocket for my last cigarette of the pack.

We returned to the King, my face stuck in a permanent scowl.

"What happened?" he asked with great concern when he saw my expression.

I tossed his 200 caps onto the table. "That _pendejo_ has been putting on a show for tourists. He had a band of men pretending to attack them and get shot, but I caught them in the act and had to put them down."

"What do you mean you 'had to put them down'?"

"I shot them," I remarked flatly. "If I didn't, they were going to kill me."

"That's pretty impressive, hoss," he said with disbelief. "I'll have some of my men take care of things from here." He pushed the caps back towards me. "You can keep that for yourself."

* * *

In the coming days, the King sent me on a bunch of blasé errands, passing and collecting messages between various Kings members and establishments posted around Freeside. Occasionally, it involved the transport of caps or weapons, but overall it was pretty dull. He assured me it was necessary in building my rep – getting my face out there for everyone to see and begin to associate me with the Kings. On the upside, the deliveries usually resulted in a small tip from the parties involved in addition to the caps promised to me by the King.

Orris completely disappeared overnight, and just like that, people began to know me as the kid who single-handedly took down his team.

While running my errands, I discovered there was a small-time casino right there in Freeside called the Atomic Wrangler. When I wasn't on duty for the King, I spent a lot of time there playing cards with the patrons. Five card draw wasn't their game, but I soon learned that just about all games were some variation of poker with the cards almost always carrying the same value. Caravan was a little strange, but I was alright at it, and I was a natural at blackjack.

Like the King had suggested, I had forgotten about the Strip. Turns out I didn't need it. Very quickly, both my rep and my savings were starting to build up. The people of Freeside were actually taking me seriously, and I felt like I was starting to figure out how to find my place in a variety of social situations. For once, I didn't feel like I was being overlooked because of my small stature.

The next time I returned to Mick and Ralph's, I was on an errand for the King early on in the day.

"What's up, ace?" Ralph greeted me as I came through the door. "I heard about what you did to Orris's goons."

"Yeah, you and everyone else. I'm just here for the King's package."

He tossed a messenger bag on the counter.

I threw the strap over my shoulder and turned to leave when he called to me, "Wait." I turned back, and he slid a small brown wallet across the counter. "A little something for you."

Upon opening it, I saw that inside was a passport made up for me. I smiled and ran out the door.

Sure, I didn't _need_ to get on the Strip, but now that I could…

When I brought the King his load from Mick and Ralph's, I was eager to leave so I could use my new passport.

"Hold up there, hoss. What's the hurry?"

"I'm sorry. Was there something else you wanted me to do?"

"Yeah, hang on." He opened the bag I had just handed him and pulled out a child-sized black leather jacket. "Put this on. You're one of us, now."

I was speechless as I accepted the jacket. I didn't think that day could have gotten any better, but it did.

* * *

"Submit to a credit check or present your passport before proceeding to the gate. Trespassers will be shot."

I proudly presented my passport.

"Thank you, sir. You may proceed."

I was tingling with excitement as I strode past the securitrons and pushed on the gate. _Here we go._

 

" _How lucky can we guy be?_

_I kissed her and she kissed me_

_Like a fella once said_

_Ain't that a kick in the head?"_

 

My ears and eyes were immediately assaulted by the brass of exciting, unfamiliar music playing over loud speakers, flashy lights that were bright enough to grab your attention in broad daylight, and people erratically laughing, shouting, vomiting, and being generally boisterous.

 

" _My head keeps spinning_

_I go to sleep but keep grinning_

_If this is just the beginning_

_My life is going to be_

_Beeyootiful…"_

 

It was bewitching.

With my new found poker skills and a pocketful of caps, I strolled to the nearest casino. A scantily clad, dancing woman shimmied in my direction. "Aren't you adorable!" she remarked.

"I'm a lot older than I look, lady."

"Is that so? I'll still play house with you if you got the caps."

"No, thanks. I got stuff to do." _Weirdo._

"I'll be around if you change your mind," she said with a giggle as I pushed past her.

Inside, the sights and sounds were equally as glitzy as the exterior, and there were tenfold as many games and tables as the Atomic Wrangler. They were in nicer condition, too. I didn't know where to start…

Turns out, my suspicions were true. If you have the caps, your size doesn't have any bearing on the amount of respect you receive. Being much more conservative with my money than when I first started out, sometimes I would lose, but with care, my overall winnings were in the green. I felt like a somebody.

I didn't stay in just one casino, either. I made my way down the Strip in an attempt to try them all before I had to be home for the night. I ended up cutting my tour short at the Tops, though, in a turn of impossible luck.

I was in between tables when I overheard an argument between a dealer and the pit boss.

"You're breaking rotation! How am I supposed to make any damn caps when you always give all the money tables to Pauly?""

"Maybe if you weren't such a ding-bat, you'd find some better opportunities falling into your lap."

"This is bullshit! You always do this…"

"Yeah, your whining is really making me regret this. Just get to your table." The pit boss started to walk away from the situation, leaving the dealer standing there with a tray full of chips, looking increasingly more disgruntled with every step away the boss took.

"Hey, floor!"

His boss stopped and turned back.

"Fuck you!"

He put on an intimidating face. "Pull your lid, Mack."

I had no idea what they were talking about, but I could tell things were going to end badly for the dealer.

"No, I said fuck you!" He tossed the tray into the air and gave the man the middle finger while it rained 100 cap-valued chips down all around him.

The boss didn't flinch. He flippantly motioned toward the dealer while addressing the guards. "Ice this punk."

The guards opened fire and pumped the poor guy full of lead.

While everyone erupted into panic, I discreetly started scooping up the chips and casually sauntered away unnoticed.

Up at the chip window, the cashiers were still staring at the ruckus with awe.

"I'd like to cash out," I told them.

Barely paying me any mind, she took the chips and converted them into caps. "I don't blame ya kid. Thing's are getting kinda hot around here."

I calmly strolled past all the chaos to the exit, heavy with caps, and made my way home, grinning from ear to ear.

When I got back to the ranch, mom opened the door as I approached it. She stared in shock and amazement at me donning my King's jacket and a brand new greased-back hairstyle with armfuls of caps.

"Hi, mom."

"Shaun! You look like some kind of gangster!"

As I moved past her into the house, I felt like one.


	10. Leaving the Table (Mariachi Suite)

The morning that Ambrosia and I were supposed to go look for Raul, I was up before the sun once again. Ya know how it is. Little Rosalita wasn't much for sleeping in, and she's pretty much in charge.

And once again, Shaun was already out by the gravesite working on his breakfast cigarette when I came out for mine. I leaned up against the fence post next to him and lit one. "Is that still from the same pack?"

"Yes."

_Good. Maybe he'll lose interest when they're gone._

"I only have one more after this," he said, holding the pack open to show me. "I don't suppose… Would you leave me a couple? For while you're gone."

I looked over at him as I blew my smoke out. "No."

He hung his head. "Okay."

Once Ambrosia was up and about, we said our goodbyes and headed out. I hated leaving Felina to take care of the baby on her own like that. I could already see the lack of sleep wearing on her, but she was really adamant about us getting the house set up ASAP. And whatever Felina wants, Felina gets…

The sun was just barely over the horizon when we started our journey, and I was still a bit groggy. Once my morning mentats started to kick in, though, I felt the need for some intellectual stimulation. "So, tell me about 'the best repairman in the Mojave'."

"Raul? Oh, he's great. Ya'll are gonna love him."

Several moments of silence later, I glanced over at Ambrosia, not seeing any indication that she was going to expand on that. "You really ain't much of a story-teller, huh?"

"Seriously, I think you're going to get along fabulously."

"Ambrosia, I recently walked 3,000 miles, ya know, so it's really saying something when I tell you this is gonna be a really long trip if you don't start opening up a little."

She sighed. "Well, let me see. For starters, he's a ghoul."

"There ya go! Please, go on."

"And he's Mexican."

"Oh, Felina will _love_ that." I suddenly thought of that Chad asshole in Kudzu Bluff. _Hopefully not too much…_

"And he's a repairman."

"Yeah, I caught that much. How did you meet him?"

"He was being held captive by a nightkin, and I rescued him."

"What's a nightkin?"

"It's like a super mutant with a chem problem."

The conversation dropped off again.

"Look, I'm sorry," she suddenly said out of nowhere. "I'm not usually like this, but this place… It's really got me stuck in my thoughts. I left a lot of shit unresolved here, some of which I feel a bit guilty about, and I haven't faced any of those demons in a long time. I'm still just kind of… sorting through it."

"Believe me, I understand. You know me, though. I ain't one to judge. Feel free to get anything off your chest you want."

She laughed uneasily. "I'll keep that in mind."

Much later when the sun was high and the heat was starting to peak, we came upon a shack nestled into some rocks with a junk car out front. She meandered up to the door.

"This his place?"

"Yeah…" She knocked on the door, but there was no answer. She let herself in, and I followed behind her into the one-room shack. The only thing inside was a workbench and a bed. Everything was covered in dust and looked like it hadn't been touched in ages. She zoned out, standing perfectly still.

"Ambrosia?"

Wandering back outside, she stared intently at the picked-clean skeleton of a brahmin. "He's not here."

"Yeah, I'm seeing that."

She had a seat in the dirt. "Where could he be?"

"You'd know better than I would."

After a while of her not moving, I took a seat next to her. As we sat in silence, she pulled out a canteen and took a sip from it.

"May I?" I asked her.

She held it out to me while still staring off into the distance. "Be my guest."

I took a swig from it, expecting water and almost choking when the sting hit the back of my throat. "Is this whiskey?" I exclaimed as I pulled it away from my mouth.

"Heh, yeah."

With a shrug, I took a deeper swig and handed it back. "So. What now?"

She took another gulp before screwing the cap back on and putting it away. "I have some ideas, but none of them seem too promising." She stood and started walking back up the road.

"Are we just gonna head back?"

"I don't know. I'm playing it by ear right now, but either way, I'd like to get back on the highway for safety's sake."

Once we were back on the road for a while, I saw a weapons outpost up a little ways and started leading her that way.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"You're concerned about safety, right?" I proclaimed as I approached the counter. "You could use a better weapon, and I need some more ammo." The protectron working the counter behind some bulletproof glass addressed me, and I started asking him some questions about the merchandise.

Ambrosia pulled on my sleeve. "Forget this, huh?"

"Just a sec."

While I was still browsing, a young woman called to us from a little bit away. "Courier!" Ambrosia and I both turned to look as she came running towards us. "Do you remember me?"

My companion looked a little distant. "Not exactly…"

"My family and I were enslaved by Caesar's Legion years ago, but you freed us. I was just a little girl back then."

"Oh, yeah…"

"I owe you my life, courier!"

Ambrosia only blushed a little, but against her pale skin, it was extremely obvious. "Ah, think nothing of it."

They conducted some small talk for a little bit, and the girl gave her a Sunset Sarsaparilla, apologizing that she didn't have more to give her.

Once she left, I started toward the shop again. "So, are you more of a rifleman or a pistol slinger?"

"Neither. Don't give the Gun Runners any of your caps."

"But I need ammo."

She began walking away, sipping her sarsaparilla. "C'mon. I know a better place to get armed."

We continued down the main road for a while, but she eventually took us off the path when it was close to sunset. We set up camp near the base of some small mountains. We were sitting near our fire, snacking on some geckos we had hunted when she suddenly let out a huge sigh and pulled her canteen back out. "I'm sorry this hasn't gone as planned so far."

"Hey, forget about it. I've come to expect things to always turn out more complicated than they should be. Felina, too. We talked about it before you and I left, and she knew we were going to be more than a couple days."

"Well, that's somewhat of a relief, I suppose." She knocked back some of her whiskey in contemplative silence, offering it to me once more. About the time I was feeling the whiskey's warmth, she started to loosen up. "I just feel kinda bad about the way I left things here."

"Lighten up, sister. It doesn't seem so bad. What about that girl that thanked you for saving her life?"

"Yeah, I didn't even recognize her. That's what sucks. Being adored by the faceless masses is unappealing when you've lost all your closest friends."

"Who, like Arcade? He seemed a little bitter, but I didn't get the impression that he hated ya or anything."

She chuckled lightly. "Yeah, he and I have always had that dynamic. I was never that close to him, though. I was talking more along the lines of Boone and Veronica."

"Yeah, about that. What happened between you and that Boone guy?"

"Not what you think. He and I never… hooked up, as you implied back at the dam. I just didn't want to get into it. He and I used to be pretty close, but he's ex-NCR, whom I have never cared for, but we united under a common enemy."

"The Legion?"

"Bingo. He probably would have continued to tolerate me if I didn't bomb that NCR outpost that Arcade was talking about."

"Why'd ya do it, then?"

"The short version? Because I don't like the NCR. The way I saw it, once I was presented with the opportunity, it had to happen."

I looked up at the star-speckled night sky, feeling pretty buzzed, but not the least bit sleepy. "So what's the long version, then?"

"You really want to know?"

"I asked, didn't I?"

She sighed, throwing back the rest of the whiskey in her canteen. "It's because of Veronica. Veronica was…sweet. Innocent. Ambitious." Her voice became all dreamy-like. "Beautiful."

" _I_ see," I said with a smirk as I lit a cigarette. "You were in love with her."

"Like you wouldn't believe! And I was just a kid back then, you know, so when I fell, I fell hard." She beckoned toward me. "Can I have one of those?"

I handed her a cigarette. "I didn't think you smoked."

"I don't," she remarked, pulling some flames from the fire to the cigarette with a blade of dry brush. She took a drag and continued, "Veronica was a member of the Brotherhood of Steel. Me, her, and Boone traveled together for a long time. Sometimes, we had others with us, like Raul, but the three of us were inseparable . All of us hated the Legion, and that was our primary goal – to drive them from the Mojave. The BoS was dying off at the time, though. Veronica believed that if the Elder altered some of their priorities, all that could change. We tried presenting him with proof that minor tweaks in the way he ran things could yield positive results for the faction, but he wasn't being swayed. I only tried helping her with that because I cared about her and that's what she wanted. I would have rather she left them."

"Yeah, fuck those hard-headed bastards. Felina and I had some altercations with them back home. Things are supposed to be cool between us now, but I still don't like them."

"I didn't really have any strong feelings for them one way or the other. They were pretty impotent at the time, and I just found them to be an inconvenient distraction. See, I was working on Veronica, getting closer to her, making my intentions with her well-known, and if things had continued the way they were, I think she would have been more open to the idea. But, in our travels, we were proposed with the possibility of uniting the Brotherhood and the NCR in a battle for the dam. I was opposed to it though, because as I mentioned before, I hate the NCR. Because of this, Boone was closer to Veronica than he was with me."

"Why do you hate the NCR so much?"

"Oh, they suck. Big time. I saw lots of it firsthand as a courier. Empty promises of an improved quality of life quickly followed by taxes, strict laws punishable by death, overly-funded military, bullying, doing a poor job of protecting those in their jurisdiction..."

"Oppression wrapped in a pretty package."

"Exactly. I wasn't sure what the best thing for anyone was, but I was pretty sure, _that_ wasn't it. The BoS has similar imperialistic tendencies, though, so Veronica didn't really see it my way. I was in the midst of working towards a free New Vegas, but the two of them became obsessed with the alliance idea and wanted me to incorporate it into our plan. I refused, and they started to form a unit against me. By this time, Veronica _did_ admit to having feelings for me, but my stance on the alliance issue was holding her back from acting on those feelings. We had a huge fight one night, and I told them I needed to go do some stuff on my own for a little while…"

She paused as she finished off the last couple puffs of her cigarette, thumping the butt into the fire. "I followed up on a message I had received from the original courier that was supposed to have delivered the package that got me embroiled in this region's politics in the first place. I'll spare you the details of that one and tell you how it ends: I had the chance to either aim some nuclear missiles for a delayed launch on Caesar's Legion, or I could immediately nuke the NCR outpost set up on the Long 15 – the main road to and from the west. I had already set a lot of shit in motion for an independent Vegas, and victory against the Legion was pretty much a guarantee by then. So I saw it as my opportunity to ensure the NCR didn't rise to power once the Legion was out of the way …and maybe it had a little bit to do with getting Veronica to let that ridiculous plan with Boone go, since it was supposedly the only thing holding her back from being with me… When I returned from my solo journey, my friendship with Boone was irreparable."

"What about Veronica?"

Her gaze drew downward. "She admitted that she had found some of my acts before a little questionable, but that now she was pretty sure I was too selfish and had unresolvable anger issues and blah blah blah. She thought I was a monster and preferred Boone's company over mine. When she left, I lost all motivation and joined the Followers of the Apocalypse as the mid-wife's apprentice. It was symbolic. Joining the Followers was our go-to fantasy we would talk about for if she ever left the Brotherhood. I held onto hope that one day she would change her mind and find me there, but she never did."

"Wow. That's… really tough."

"Sometimes, I would go visit that irradiated outpost where I launched the missiles and just reflect on what a horrible person I had been. Eventually, I gave up hope on Veronica forgiving me and left the Mojave."

Neither one of us spoke for a moment. Ambrosia finally took a deep breath. "Well, I do feel a little bit better telling you about it but…"

"But?"

"It doesn't really change anything between me and Veronica."

"It's been years. Maybe she'd be willing to give you another chance."

"Heh. Yeah." She laid down in her sleeping bag. "I've thought about it enough for one night, though."

I nestled into my own bedroll. "Fair enough."

* * *

The next morning, Ambrosia led us further into the mountains.

"I thought we were getting ammo and shit?"

"We are."

"Who the hell has a shop set up in the middle of nowhere in the damn mountains?"

"No one."

We came around a huge boulder and were face to face with a cave entrance soiled by some bright green, glowing radioactive waste. The stuff was dripping everywhere and pooled in front of the opening. "Well, this looks like a good time."

"You really mean that, don't you?"

I took a hit of jet and stepped into the puddle. "The Children of Atom ain't the only ones who appreciate radiation, sister."

A smile stretched across her face as she trounced through it to the cave like a kid playing in the rain. "This way."

Further into the cave, we came upon a vault entrance, and that same giddy grin returned. In the main atrium, she grabbed the railing and hopped down to the next floor. I followed, hoping there was an easier way back up on the way out.

She led us through the maze of rusty, dripping corridors past dozens of decayed remains in vault suits and the like. One look at the corpses, and I was compelled to pull out my shotgun that I had holstered to climb up the mountain's side.

"No need for that," she assured me. "I cleared this place out years ago.

The moment her voice echoed down the halls, it was answered by the snarl of a feral ghoul. I reflexively swung my gun around and blew its head off. "There's always more ferals," I told her, reloading.

With that, she pulled out her dinky little varmint rifle before continuing further into the vault.

Turn after turn, it felt like we had been in there forever. She came to a stop at a terminal. "Cover me," she said as she shouldered her rifle and started typing away.

While she was putting in a password, another feral emerged from the shadows, and I blew its torso in two. She gasped as the separated upper half continued to growl and bare its teeth while attempting to pull itself toward us.

"What do you call a feral with no legs?" I cocked my gun and fired again, turning its face into unrecognizable goo that splattered all over us. "Whatever you want. After all, he can't chase you."

She stood there frozen, her arms spread away from her body as the partially decomposed meat dripped from her.

"It was a joke," I told her.

"Yeah, I get it." She flung the slop from her arms and immediately started leading us back the way we had come.

"You sure you know where you're going?"

"Absolutely," she responded. "I could never forget this place." She came to a door that was shuddering in an attempt to close, but was blocked by debris. She ducked through it and led us down some stairs. The next floor down was dark and flooded with a few inches of irradiated water.

I moved ahead of her as we neared a corner, and I stopped with my back to the wall. "I got another one," I told her as I peeked around to the other side. "How many ghouls does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

"I… don't know."

"They don't need to." I fired around the corner, and the shot's echo was followed by a growl. "They just huddle around the glowing one."

"Wait, what?" Just then, the glowing feral I was firing at charged around the corner into her view. "Oh, shit!"

We both shot at it, stopping it in its tracks and dismembering it as a team. Once the thing finally stopped moving, she turned to me with wide, angry eyes. "Please stop doing that."

I shrugged. "Just trying to liven things up."

"Things are plenty lively already, Hancock." She trudged ahead of me.

I followed her. "Is that another ghoul pun?"

"No."

She came to a stop in a room with a sign over it that said armory, bending down to open a locked gun case. "There was already a lot of good shit here when I first found this place, but I also stashed a few things here for safe keeping before I left the Mojave. Help yourself to whatever you want."

"Gladly." I started rifling through lockers and shelves, picking up all the ammo I could carry. I glanced over at her for a moment and saw her holding up a dress in wistful consideration.

She saw me watching and quickly shoved it in her bag. "You asked about my preferred weapon."

"Yeah?"

With her back to me, she held up some sticks of dynamite. "I prefer explosives."

"I like your style, sister."

"But as far as guns go…" She stood up with a rather large rifle. "I'm pretty fond of this thing. " She held it out to me. "Here, check it out."

I examined the woodland camoed firearm . "Semi-automatic…sniper rifle?"

"The All-American! " she exclaimed, digging through the case some more. "Boone wanted that thing sooo bad, but I wouldn't let him have it."

Once I was done scrutinizing it, I looked up and saw her putting on a long, black sleeveless duster with a variation of the American flag spray painted on the back. She transformed into a completely different person as she turned to face me with dynamite sticking out of every pocket and bandoliers of ammo hanging all over her. She took the rifle from my arms. "We good, now?"

"Oh, yeah," I said with a smirk. "I'd say we're better than good."

A devious smile crossed her face. "Let's go kick some shit!"

"And find Raul."

"…And find Raul."


	11. Viva La Raza

She led us back down the mountain and onto the main road. "There's something else you should know about Raul if we ever find him."

"You mean _when_ ," I replied. "Right?"

"Just like everyone else, the wastes have damaged him psychologically."

"Naturally."

"I won't go into all of it, but part of it was he had some issues about aging, and I don't think I helped things for him in that department. So, it would probably be best if you don't make a big thing of it or mention how young you are."

"Okay…" It seemed like an odd request, but for once, she was sharing some potentially pertinent information ahead of time instead thinking of it after the fact, so I wasn't going to gripe.

She dragged me around the desert for days, inquiring in several different places on Raul's whereabouts, but no one had seen him in a while.

As we were leaving a quaint little town called Goodsprings, we stopped at their water source for a drink.

"You out of ideas, yet?" I asked her while she let the cool water from the pump pour over her head.

"I still got one more, but it's a long shot."

"I'm game."

It was getting dark when we neared the base of a different mountain. I slowed to a stop. "Shall we set up camp?"

She held a finger up to her lips and shook her head. "This is _not_ a good place for that," she hissed, dropping down into a crouch and motioning towards the distance. "This is cazador country."

I didn't know what a cazador was, but it didn't sound good in that context. I joined her crouch, digging some psycho out of my stash. "Shall I prepare to stay up all night then?"

"I don't know if all that's necessary. If we use the darkness as cover, we may be able to sneak to where we're going pretty quickly."

"Which is where, exactly?"

She pointed to the summit. "The top of Black Mountain."

"Yay," I said sarcastically. "More mountain climbing."

As we slinked up the mountain, in the rough terrain just to the side of the beaten trail, I was starting to get sore from all the extra crouching and climbing. I ducked down behind a rock and leaned against it.

"What's up?" she whispered, coming to my side.

I was shooting up some med-x. "I'm starting to see why your other ghoul friend had an age complex. The shit you've had me doing lately really has _me_ feeling old."

She shook her head and then turned to keep a look out. Right as I was wrapping things up, she flung her head back to me with another urgent _shh_ gesture. "Nightkin up ahead."

I took a peek over the rock to catch a glimpse of what she was referring to. "I don't see anything."

"Look harder," she said almost inaudibly.

Another peek, and this time, I saw the not-so distant scenery shimmering like a bad jet trip. Suddenly, a hulking, blue super mutant appeared walking towards us.

We both remained perfectly still, ducked down out of sight as the thing lumbered past us down the trail. Once it was sufficiently far away, we moved out.

"If there's one, there's more," she warned me in increasingly more hushed tones.

Right about then, I was wishing I had brought Felina's silenced pistol that Shaun had built . Sure, I'm good with a knife, but I wasn't going to push my luck on towering super mutants that abuse stealth boys on an unfamiliar mountain at night. It was an all around bad idea.

As we neared the end of the trail, we could see two nightkin hanging out by a chain link fence. Beyond them were several small buildings and some satellite dishes. "That shack just past them is where I'm taking us," she informed me. "We're in the home stretch."

"Yeah, but those brutes don't look like they're going anywhere anytime soon."

"So it's time to be as stealthy as you've ever been. Only shoot if we're spotted."

As we moved ever-so slowly and ever-so carefully past them in the shadows, I could overhear the conversation they were having with each other.

"I'm hungry. For human."

"Humans. Hmph. Stringy. Boney."

"But tasty. Better than brahmin. Or bugs."

"Anything's better than bugs."

"Not ghouls."

"Heh. You're right, brother. Not ghouls."

I was smiling as we gently closed the shack door behind us.

"What's so amusing?"

"Looks like I'm not the preferred menu option, tonight."

She held up her prized firearm. "It doesn't matter who's tastier," she told me with a playful smirk. "It's who's more dangerous."

"Oh, don't underestimate me, sister."

She crossed the room and tried the handle on a door there, standing in seeming shock that it opened.

"What's the matter?" I came over to her side.

"It's not even locked…"

A gruff voice spoke from beyond the door. "There you are, boss."

She pushed the door open all the way, and there was a ghoul with a mustache wearing a mechanic's jumpsuit and sitting at a desk.

He took a look at me and then back at her. "It's only been seven years, and you replaced me already, boss? And he likes to dress up… Is this because I wouldn't wear the vaquero costume?"

"Raul, why are you back here again?"

"Well, I was working on fixing up that car back at my place and needed a tool that I left here. Once my old bones made it up the mountain, I realized I really missed being held prisoner by nightkin, so I decided to stay."

I raised one brow. "Seriously?"

Ambrosia sighed. "No, he only has one mode: sarcastic." She walked over to him and put an arm under his, urging him up to his feet. "They weren't holding you prisoner, you know. You could have left at any time."

"Did you forget, boss? It's not my brain that's old. It's my body. I know they aren't holding me here, but they may as well be. They weren't here when I came up, but I saw them outside when I went to go, and there's no way I could have taken them on or outrun them. It was safer for me to just stay put."

She started leading him to the door. "We're going to take you home, now, okay." She paused before opening it. "Okay, ya'll. Same rules as before, stay low and silent, follow my lead, don't shoot unless you have to."

I nodded my head towards Raul. "Does he have guns?"

"Does a cazador fly?" he replied.

"I dunno, does it?"

Ambrosia grimaced. "Yes, he has guns. Now everyone, zip it! Here we go…"

The three of us moved in a crouched line out the door with Ambrosia in the front and Raul safely sandwiched between us. She took us dangerously close to the nightkin to get back to the fence's gate, but they continued idly babbling as though we weren't there.

"This is boring! Nothing ever happens up here! We should be down there! Searching for more stealth boys!"

"Shut up, stupid! All you do is complain!"

"Forget it. You too dumb to talk to."

Once we were past them, I couldn't help looking back one final time at the terrifying, yet amusing duo on guard for…whatever reason. When I turned back, I didn't see Ambrosia or Raul. _Shit…_

I picked up my pace as much as I could while remaining stealthy to try and find them. I kept glancing around in all directions, hoping to catch even the tiniest bit of their movement so I could rejoin them, but the sneaky bastards were doing a really good job of staying hidden. _Sonuva…_

While glancing over my shoulder yet again, I found I had run into something. I swung my gaze forward, and my eyes trailed up the hazy, shimmering outline of a nightkin right in front of me.

He raised a rebar club over his head. "Got you now!"

_Shitshitshit!_ I rolled to one side as the club hit the ground right beside me with an earth-shaking boom. The other two nightkin further up the trail grunted to attention and immediately took a couple stealth boys, disappearing into oblivion, but I could hear the stomps of their feet closing in on me.

Running backwards down the mountainside, I kept firing as fast as I could at the kneecaps of the nightkin in pursuit of me, their clubs whizzing repeatedly in front of my face. They seemed unfazed by my attacks. I tripped over a rock and my eyes locked on the wavy ghosts of the towering brutes about to bring their clubs down on me as I fell in seemingly slow motion.

Far off in the distance, a rat-a-tat-tat cracked through the night, and the front nightkin stumbled backwards, blood spurting from several areas of his body. He growled in annoyance, shaking it off while his two allies grabbed at their arm and chest respectively, also shot.

"Run, Hancock!" Ambrosia called to me from what sounded like a mile away.

I sprang to my feet and made a break for the downslope, sliding into yet another nightkin that had been alerted to the brawl by all the commotion. I turned on a dime and scrambled the other direction toward the first group of nightkin, still belly-aching over their wounds and trying to get back in the game. "There he goes!"

As I ran past them, two rapidly fired bullets from a pair of pistols tore straight through each one's skull respectively, dropping them almost instantly.

Heavy footfalls were growing in number behind me. I was now being chased up the mountain by at least five or six of the fuckers, but I didn't look back to get an accurate count. Not when I kept hearing and feeling explosions directly behind me. As I neared the grouping of shacks where we started, I saw Ambrosia and Raul already at the top of a steel skeleton of a lookout tower, furiously firing past me and tossing dynamite all around.

I could feel the breeze across the back of my neck as one of those clubs narrowly missed me. The following explosion from Ambrosia's dynamite was aimed accurately at the enemies, equally as close as they were. The blast from it propelled me through the air forward, flinging me into a rock. It saved me from getting smashed by one of those concrete clubs they were wielding, but it wasn't exactly a painless landing.

Shuffling to my feet in a daze, a fallen nightkin nearby was doing the same. He came at me clumsily like a drunk in a barroom brawl. I dove between his legs as I went for my knife, making a frantic slice at the back of his legs. I missed the first one, but grazed his other just above the ankle, causing him to take a dirt dive.

He reached for his torn leg muscle, groaning in agony. "Mother fucker! I will kiiill yoooou!" He reached for the club he dropped.

"Not today." I tossed my knife, sticking it in his hand and stopping him from getting his weapon. He screamed again, shaking his hand until the blade flung loose. I took a rolling dive for it, and he reached for another stealth boy. By the time I had recovered my knife, he was invisible. "Where'd ya go, asshole…?"

It was only quiet for a moment. Although I still couldn't find him visually, the rumbling stomps of his limp gave his position away. Smooth as butter, I slid my knife back into its home and drew my shotgun, taking a blind shot in approximation. With a shudder, his body reappeared mere inches in front of me as he fell backwards with nothing attached from the jaw up, and his tongue waving obscenely upward like a flag of surrender.

I made a beeline for the lookout tower where Ambrosia and Raul were still ceaseless attacking from, and upon reaching the top, I could see hordes of the irate nightkin making their way up to the mountaintop. Ambrosia was waging a one-man war on them while Raul fired headshot after headshot with deadly accuracy from a couple six-shooters, but it was hardly putting a dent in their numbers as more unseen ones kept materializing.

"Okay!" Ambrosia yelled over the blasts from her semi-automatic rifle. "Time for Plan B! Shortcut down the mountain!"

"Shortcut?"

She pointed to the east, down a steep slope. "Yeah, shortcut!"

"Understood."

"Ready?"

I shrugged and Raul shook his head no.

"Alright, let's go!"

We rushed down the tower stairs and toward the mountain's edge over piles of blue and red gore. There was no keeping your footing. All three of us stumbled and began to roll down the side, getting beat and battered by stray rocks all the way down as the nightkins' battle cries rapidly faded away in the distance.

Once we had all rolled to a stop, we just sort of laid there in growling agony.

I could feel my heartbeat throbbing in my head somehow. "I shoulda taken the psycho afterall…"

"Gee, thanks for saving me, boss. I don't know what I would have done without you."

Ambrosia winced as she pulled her arm out from under her. "Can it, Raul."

"I got plenty of med-x to go around," I said in strained tones.

"I may have to take you up on that," Ambrosia replied. "If we can't find some liquor."

We eventually started limping and dragging ourselves north up the road.

Taking more med-x, I was really feeling the effects the tumble took on my body. "When can we stop for the night?"

"Just a little further. There should be a trading post coming up."

As we approached an intersection in the highway, I could see the glimmer of lamps from makeshift housing and barrel fires grouped around a bridge. _Oh, thank god._

Ambrosia went straight to the nearest caravan trader, already pulling caps out. "Whiskey?" she said without care for how desperate she sounded.

"Heh, yeah. You look like you could really use it." He took her caps and turned to dig through the bags on his pack brahmin.

"We'll take a few stimpaks, too, if you got 'em." While he had his back to her, Ambrosia's tired eyes began to wander, stopping on a tame molerat by his feet. "Snuffles?"

The molerat made a friendly whuff sound.

"It _is_ you!" she exclaimed, giving it a pat on the head.

The trader gave her a fifth and a handful of stimpaks, taking some more caps from her. "Hey, I remember you! You're that mailman that cleared all the deathclaws out of the quarry! You and that sniper with the red beret…"

She immediately opened the bottle and took a healthy chug, passing it on to us. "That'd be me."

"Yep, that was really quite a feat." He crossed his arms. "Don't mean nothin' now though. Since the NCR left, t'ain't no work for us miners."

The bottle made it back around to Ambrosia by then, and she took another greedy swig, wiping her mouth with her arm. "The caravan business isn't working out for you?"

"It has been for me, but summa my peers ain't been so lucky."

She refilled her canteen with the whiskey and handed the bottle off to Raul. "I'm sorry to hear that, but I think we're all better off without the NCR." She gave Snuffles another pat and started moving past them.

"Most of us, yeah. But not all of us."

We went to a common area and set up camp with the others that were sleeping there under the bridge. Leaned up against the concrete, we administered the stimpaks and continued to drain the fifth of whiskey.

"So, how did you know I was on Black Mountain, boss?"

"I didn't. It was a wild guess."

"Who's your other ghoul friend?"

I extended my hand for a shake. "John Hancock."

He accepted my gesture. "Raul Alphonse Tejada," he said with perfect native annunciation. "That's a crazy get up you got there, boss."

I looked down at my frock coat. "One of a kind, as a matter-of-fact. Shit's hundreds of years older than the war."

"You can't even tell," he replied, eyeballing the frayed seams.

"I've heard you're quite the repairman, but I gotta admit, I was more impressed by your gunslinging up on the mountain," I remarked as I took a hit of jet. "You didn't strike me as a scrapper."

"Oh, I was a hell of a gunslinger back in my day, boss, but time has been taking its toll on me. Thankfully, Amy here encouraged me to focus on my mechanical skills a few years back so I'm not just a useless old man."

"I wouldn't give up on those shooting skills entirely if I were you. You've still got a lotta spark left." Just past Raul, I saw Ambrosia making a guilty, pleading face at me. I wasn't exactly sure what that was about.

"What keeps you going?" he asked me. "Is it the chems? 200 years and more after the war, you must surely be feeling your age, too, amigo."

"I, uh…"

Ambrosia was waving "no" behind him.

"I don't know…"

"You don't know?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." I finished off the last of the whiskey and tossed the bottle in the gutter. "Look, it's been a long, rough night. Maybe we should just get some sleep, huh?"

* * *

I was up before everyone else the next morning, as though I had gotten my morning wake-up call from Rosalita even though she was miles across the desert away from me. Feeling stiff, I popped a couple mentats and some med-x, and laid there awake until the chems kicked in. By then, the whole marketplace was beginning to wake up and bustle, so I decided to take a look at the variety of shit for sale at the outpost.

While I was still browsing, Ambrosia strolled up beside me. "If you want Raul to fix your house, I'd lay off that gunslinging crap if I were you."

"Why?"

"When I met him years ago, I already had a posse of sharpshooters at my disposal, so when he started talking about taking his guns back up, I talked him out of it. I needed a repairman more than I needed another fighter."

I could feel my face twisting in outward display of my inner disgust. "That's a little fucked up, ain't it?"

"I don't know, is it? You're going to get your house fixed, sooo…"

I began absently walking to the next trade stand. "What, like he couldn't handle working on his shooting skills _and_ his repair skills?"

"Like I said, I had plenty of shooters already. It was strategy."

"What about _his_ well-being? The poor guy decided to just settle into a random shack stuck in the middle of nowhere because he had no confidence in his ability to defend himself."

"Yeah, but that was never my intention."

"You're actions affect others, Ambrosia," I said in my dad voice without even meaning to.

"I realize that now, but the full gravity of that wasn't as clear to me back then."

I paused to light a cigarette, my patience for this conversation quickly fading. "That ain't a good excuse."

"What happened to 'I'm not one to judge'?"

"The past is the past. We all make mistakes, but you can't play dumb now so you can keep making them at someone else's expense."

"I know, I know. Look, if it makes you feel better, I'd do things different if I had them to do over again, but the damage is already done. So if you want to encourage him to start brawling again, go for it, but it would still probably be in your best interest if you wait until after he does all the repairs you need."

"That seems pretty dirty." I was suddenly distracted by some clothes behind the counter of one shop.

She began to walk away. "The whole world is dirty, Hancock. You know that."

* * *

When we finally made it back to the ranch, Felina came running out excitedly to greet us with Rosalita clutched to her chest. I threw my arms out for her to run into, but as she got closer, her excitement transformed into surprised amusement and she came to a dead stop right in front of me, looking me up and down. "Oh… my… god!"

"Don't you like it?" I turned a 360 to give her a full view. The tails of my new cowboy duster flared in a satisfying flutter reminiscent of my frock coat, and my spurs jingle-jangled.

She reached up to the black desperado hat I was wearing, angling it further down to shade both our faces as she drew nearer to me. "I fuckin' love it!"

I pulled her to me for a fierce kiss. When our lips pulled apart, I gave Rosalita a peck and looked back over at Felina. "This is just a novelty, ya know. I can never fully retire the Hancock duds."

"As if _that_ one isn't a novelty…"

"Keep up that sass and I won't give you your new dress." I started leading us to the house. "Where's that bad little boy of ours?"

"Oh, don't get me started."


	12. Nude

Just as I suspected, Felina adored Raul. Unlike with that Chad fellow, I found their chattering in Spanish comforting.

However, Felina was less thrilled about the other extra guest Ambrosia had brought back with us.

"C'mon, Felina," she pleaded. "Do you have any idea how rare cats are in these parts?"

"Yeah, I do." She crossed her arms with a scowl. "That's part of this post-war desert's appeal for me."

The little dust-colored kitten in Ambrosia's arms let out a pitiful mew, and she pouted. "Look at it."

"I've seen it."

I tried to warn her Felina wouldn't go for it, but she didn't listen.

"You know I paid actual caps for her."

"It stays outside."

"It's too dangerous outside for a kitten!"

"They stink, and they get hair everywhere!"

"So do dogs."

"Not like cats though…

About that time, Shaun and Dogmeat were coming up the road, and I took that as my cue to meet him out there. I made my way toward him and couldn't help but notice his new look. "Rebel without a cause?"

"I think you mean Jailhouse Rock, _pardner_ ," he retorted, eyeballing my new clothes as well.

I reached over and grabbed the cigarette he had tucked behind his ear, lighting it for myself.

"Hey!"

"I just did you a favor, killer. If your mom had seen that, you'd be learning the true meaning of Jailhouse Rock."

"Whatever."

I blew a couple smoke rings with the stolen cigarette. "So what kinda trouble you get into while I was gone?"

"No trouble. Whatever mom told you is a lie."

"And why would your mom lie to me about you?"

He held his arms out. "She doesn't like my new jacket and overreacted a little."

I chuckled. "So where'd ya get that thing, anyhow?"

"The King of Freeside. He likes me a lot. Dogmeat especially."

"I didn't know Freeside was a monarchy."

"It's just a title."

I tossed the cigarette and stomped it out. "C'mon. I'll introduce you to Raul."

* * *

It was already pretty late in the day when we had arrived, so we held off on any repairs and set up some space for Raul for the night. We all ate and got to know Raul a little better. After dinner, Felina played a little guitar, and it was like a mini party until she had to put Rosalita down for the night. Shaun took over, playing his violin, and I excused myself to go with Felina.

She was singing Rosalita's lullaby for her as our little girl fell asleep in her arms. Once she put her in the stroller, I leaned in and gave her a goodnight kiss, just staring for a long time at her sweet little face. "She's so gorgeous."

"I didn't have to do nearly as much when Shaun was born," Felina wearily remarked as she stripped down and laid on the bed behind me. "There was baby formula and Codsworth… She's a lot of work."

"Does that mean you're giving up on your dream of being a baby factory?"

"She's lucky she's so pretty," she added playfully, dodging my half-serious question.

"Oh, definitely. I mean, look at her old man."

"I think you're pretty, too, querido."

I gave a weak smile in acknowledgment of her dishonest compliment. "You're doing an amazing job with everything, love." I undressed down to my underwear and laid down beside Felina with an arm over her. "And it won't be so hard on you now that Ambrosia and I are back."

"I missed you," she said, tracing a finger down my chest. Her mouth curled deviously. "And it's been two weeks…" She preferred to sleep naked, so I hadn't really given it a second thought until her hand stopped at the band of my underwear, pulling at it gently.

"Are you sure you're ready?"

"I've been ready, querido." She pulled me on top of her, and I let my lips fall to hers. Smoothing a palm over her breast, I flicked my thumb over her nipple, and she let out a desperate moan, pushing her body into me harder. "Please, John…"

I took a deep breath, feeling myself getting swept away by the longing in her eyes. "I'll take it slow, okay?"

With her nod of approval, I began kissing my way down her chest, past her belly button, between her thighs… I had to test the waters. Not entirely convinced she was really ready, I softly swathed my tongue at her from different angles, paying close attention to her every slight reaction. She seemed a little frantic, but it was much more like the familiar frustrated desire I was used to from her when it had been a while. My mind was put somewhat at ease as she whimpered my name in the way she had the very first time I ever got her naked. She wanted me, and god, I wanted her…

As I eased into her, she tensed up a little, but I didn't feel like I was being pushed out this time. I paused halfway. "Everything okay, love?"

"Yes…" she whispered. With every little bit more I gave her, her whispers became more forceful. I was still unsure, backing out and going back in at my easiest pace, but she dug her nails into my hips and pushed up at me, beckoning for more.

Several shallow pumps later, her eyes started to glaze over, and I watched them intently, trying to place exactly what it meant. That look…

That's the look of someone fighting pain.

"Felina…" I backed out slowly.

"John, no."

I rolled to the side. "We need to wait a little longer."

"Can't you just…?" She huffed, throwing the blanket over us. "Hold me," she commanded.

"Of course, love."

With my arms around her, she nuzzled her face into my chest. After a few moments, she started to sob.

"Hey, what's wrong?"

"I'm still so fat, I can't fit in my old clothes…"

"Hey, that shit doesn't matter, you're still sexy –"

"And I'm tired and stressed, goddammit… I just wanted you to… I just need that reassurance right now. Closeness…"

I pet the loose strands of her hair off her forehead and laid a kiss there. "Felina, you know I love you. And I _do_ want you. Sex ain't the most important thing in the world though."

"When we can't have it, it sure feels like it."

"Remember we were friends first, love. You're still my best friend. I'm just happy to have you in my life. I'm content to just hold you…" I placed another kiss on her head, "and kiss you…"

"Can I suck your dick?"

"I…uh… ain't gonna tell ya no, but you ain't gotta –"

Before I could finish that thought, she was already under the blanket with me in her mouth.

"Fffuuuck..."

* * *

Over the next few weeks, I was overextending myself running between helping Raul around the house and Felina with the baby, all while trying to keep Shaun wrangled close to home. I know Felina and Ambrosia could've handled Rosalita just fine without me, but I wanted to be involved. And Raul certainly didn't need my inept help repairing shit. Even though we were paying him, I didn't want him to think I was some kind of ungrateful, lazy asshole, so I assisted however I could.

And Shaun. That kid was all over the place.

Felina was incredibly despondent over not being able to have penetrative sex. She's got an addictive personality, after all, and – amidst all the stress of childbirth, breastfeeding, setting up a new home, and reopened sores about her past – being denied her fix wasn't helping things. So, the long and short of it, I couldn't let my own stress show.

So, I just upped my chem intake.

Only a little. To take the edge off.

And let me tell ya, I had my doubts about the desert at first, but it's a glorious, fantastical place when your head is swimming in a pool of chem-induced euphoria. I was really looking forward to everything settling down so I could enjoy it on a more peaceful level.

Raul found that book Sturges gave us more helpful than I did. Within that first week that he was working on things, he managed to straighten out the short in the wiring or whatever so we had electricity again. From there, he moved onto some structural reinforcements.

While I was helping with that, Shaun disappeared. Later, he returned with several other fellas in leather jackets, delivering working kitchen appliances being dragged on a cart behind a brahmin.

I climbed down the ladder from the roof and caught him out front while the men were bringing out the old appliances. "Where the hell did this stuff come from?"

"The King owed me a favor."

"For what?"

"Several things."

Felina came out the front door. "What the hell is going on?! Why are these men taking my shit?!"

Shaun held his arms out. "I got you new stuff, ma!"

"Ma?! ¿Quién es ese?" She looked over at the cart. "Dios mio…"

"Pardon me, ma'am," one of the kings said to her, coming out the door behind her with the stove. She moved aside as the next guy hauled in a refrigerator on a dolly.

Felina, looking furious, was speechless for a few moments. She finally turned to go back inside. "Make sure they don't let that fucking cat in here."

Shaun was extremely pleased with himself when I glanced over at him.

I folded my arms. "This is just your way of getting out of doing manual labor, ain't it?"

"You were probably going to have me help repair the appliances anyway, so I just acquired new ones. Same ends, different means. I did my part."

I took another hit of jet and started back for the house. "I ain't sure I like the new you, Shaun."

"I didn't do anything wrong!" he called after me.

* * *

A couple weeks later, Raul and I were finally able to get the water heater fixed. We couldn't have done it without a new heating element, which Shaun somehow procured for us. I didn't ask how.

Up until then, we had just been taking cool showers during the hottest part of the day. Felina was the first to try it out the night it was repaired.

I couldn't help poking my head in the bathroom to check on her, super proud of the job on it I did. "How's that workin' for ya, love?"

"Shut the door! You're letting out all the steam."

"Sorry." I did as she asked, coming to the tub's edge to tease her by pulling the curtain back a little bit, and waves of the hot fog rolled out at me. "Is it hot enough for ya?"

"Not yet… You should take your clothes off, querido."

"Good as done."

Once I was in the shower with her, she pulled me close. "Now it's hot enough." She slid her hands up my back, pulling my head to her in a kiss.

She started to go down on me, but after a couple moments, I couldn't take it. I never thought I'd say it, but I had had enough blow jobs. "Get back up here."

She stood up. "What's the matter?"

My mind was already hazy with chems before, but now that she was getting me worked up…

I twirled a finger in front of her. "Turn around."

Once her back was to me, I grabbed her hips with both hands and pushed up close to her.  She let out a soft moan and leaned forward, grabbing onto the towel rack and spreading her stance.  Her already dark, grown-out hair looked even darker and longer while wet, hanging halfway down her back and clinging to her.  Her surrounding skin shimmered with the mist of water spraying her from behind me, and the rest of my peripheral was filled by clouds of steam in a warm, dream-like aesthetic.

Letting one hand travel in front of her for a satisfying grope of her soft breasts, we both felt my excited twitch against her backside.  With a stable grip on her entire form, I rubbed across her ass a little and easily found my way in.  Too easily.  I was in to the hilt without even meaning to be, and I froze in a slight panic.

She thrust her ass up more. "Fuck me, John," she said in a quiet plea, mindful of the tiles' great acoustics and the rest of the household that was still awake just outside the bathroom.

The pressure of her all around me was so damn good, but I couldn't help feeling a little guilty. "You okay?"

"I said I want you to fuck me," she asserted with deliberate annunciation, almost scolding.

She wasn't shying away from my girth or wincing or wavering in any way. _Finally._

I took long, gratifying strokes in and out of her while she suppressed her moans, pushing back into every blow. Every time we closed the gap between us, I was measurably closer to losing my control. It had been too long…

It's just as well, because I don't think the hot water could have outlasted my usual stamina….

"I want you to come on my face."

"Ffff, wha-?!" And with that, I had I lost it, every drop inside her. I pushed my fist into the wall beside me and leaned my head on it. "Felina…" I whined.

"What happened?"

"That's something ya probably shoulda mentioned a little sooner. I was too close… Ya kinda threw me for a loop there…"

"It's a shower. It's the perfect place for something like that." She rinsed off and stepped out, leaving me there with the steadily cooling water running down my back.

"Yeah, okay," I grumbled. "I'll remember that in the future."

* * *

I lost track of the time, but it had to have been a couple months at least before we got the house in near-perfect order. Raul had mostly been staying there with us while the renovations were still in progress, but once everything was done, he prepared to go back to his shack in the hillside.

Honestly, with everything else going on in my life, I had sorta forgot about the crusade to encourage him to pick up shooting again, having only mentioned it a couple times in passing while helping him with the work. While Shaun and I were standing out front with him, admiring our job together one final time, I thought to bring it up again. "So about those six shooters…"

"Hey, boss, don't sweat it. I'll get by. Not going to be strolling through nightkin territory any time soon, anyway."

"You _are_ pretty good with them already. Maybe you could show my boy here a thing or two if he comes to visit you every now and then," I suggested, thinking I could kill two birds with one stone and get Shaun to quit hanging out with those Freeside thugs. "Maybe talk to him in Spanish, too. His mom would love that."

Raul turned to Shaun. "I got a better idea. So, you like being a greaser, amigo?"

"We're called 'the Kings,'" he corrected him.

"Yeah, I know, but before the war, people like them were known as greasers. You know why?"

"Is it because of the hair gel?"

"That may have had something to do with it, but it was also because they used to get real dirty working on cars."

"No one does that now. No one has cars."

"I do, boss. You come over some time, and you can help me with the car I've been working on. I'll show you everything I know, and we could be the first pendejos in the Mojave to have a working vehicle."

At the start of this conversation, Shaun looked like he wanted to escape, but excitement started to bloom across his face at the suggestion. "Okay!"

Raul started off down the road, turning back one more time to add, "I'm going to take a couple days off after all the work we've been doing here, but any time after that, that's what you'll find me doing."


	13. Weird Fishes

Overall, things were finally starting to calm down. Shaun would spend a few days a week at Raul's. Rosalita was beginning to settle into a regular routine of feeding and naps, so Felina was getting regular sleep now. We were having regular sex now, too, no problem.

Felina's happiness was at an all time high, but she would still fly off the handle every now and then because of Ambrosia's cat. The damn thing was growing at an alarming rate and was already larger than any cat I had ever seen.

One afternoon, while I was playing with Rosalita, Felina was tidying up the house and found it hiding under the sofa.

"That thing is not a cat," She griped as she chased it out the door with a broom. "It's obviously mutated from…something else."

"It's like every other desert cat," Ambrosia claimed. "Why, what are cats like on the east coast?"

"Much smaller, just like prewar cats." She resumed sweeping the floor. "That damn thing is a pinche mountain lion, for Christ's sake." She stopped behind an armchair, leaning her head back in defeated frustration. "And have you seen the size of its pinche droppings?! In my fucking house…" She flung the broom down and stomped back around the chair. "I'm not cleaning up that mess! I told you I didn't want a damn cat!"

"It's fine." Ambrosia was already heading to the kitchen closet for the mop bucket. "Sandy's my cat. I don't expect you to clean up after her."

Felina was mumbling angrily under her breath. "No debería estar en la casa…"

Ambrosia froze when she saw the mess for herself.

"See what I mean? It's ridiculous."

"I don't think that's cat shit, Felina."

She scanned an accusatory finger around the room. "So which one of you full-sized hominids has been shitting on my floor then?"

"I think that's from the dog…"

"¡Puta mentira! The dog is housetrained."

"Maybe he's getting old and incontinent…"

Like a crescendo of static, I was starting to feel the sting in the sides of my head for another hit. I calmly placed Rosalita back in her stroller and rubbed my temples. "I'll be back in a minute."

I had been doing extra chems the whole time everything was in an uproar. I had toyed with the idea before about quitting altogether, but in this light, it seemed like an impossibility. A day at a time. Had to get things back to normal before even considering a drastic change like that. Tapering back down to my normal level was a big enough pain.

Such a pain, that I was struggling a little. I went through bouts of irritability, and occasionally, I would lose track of how much I had used. There were a few times when I took inventory that it didn't add up with my mental count. It was frustrating on all kinds of levels.

But I knew I would straighten it out. I was happy for everything else in my life. There was that house, Shaun and Rosalita…

And Felina.

Most of this one day is kind of a blur, but there are a few things that really stick out in my memory. Shaun was at Raul's, and Ambrosia had taken Rosalita for a walk in the stroller, presumably to visit the Followers, so Felina and I had the house to ourselves for the first time since we had got there.

After waving goodbye to Ambrosia, I headed back in the house to find Felina. When last I saw her, she was repainting the bedroom, so I came down the hall and gave the door a faint push, unprepared for what would happen next.

The door inched open with a creek, revealing to me the picture of her sitting on the dropcloth in the middle of the floor, wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt and surrounded by the buckets of paint with rays of elysian sunlight falling over her in glowing lines through the window blinds. It was a lovely sight on its own, but my associated memories with it make it even better.

Unmoving, she showed no indication that she knew I was there.

"Felina?"

She looked over her shoulder at me. "Querido…"

Her aura seemed pretty spacy, but so was I, so maybe I was just projecting. I approached her. "Is everything okay?"

Her dark eyes had an excited sparkle behind them as she gazed up at me. She just stared for a long time before she finally spoke up. "Can I paint you?"

"What, like a picture?"

"Nooo…" She rose up and lightly touched my face with paint on her fingertips. "Your body…"

With her hand still poised by my cheek, I wrapped my fingers around her wrist, all the while hopelessly attempting to read her. "I don't understand, love."

"Take off your clothes." Her voice was almost a whisper, airy and ethereal.

I hesitated, trying to catch up with the situation.

"Please?"

I took off my clothes per her request, tossing them in a chair across the room with my inquisitive stare still fixated on her.

Her eyes traveled over me slowly as a smile spread across her face. "You're so beautiful."

"You don't have to say that, love. I know I ain't exactly…"

"Shhh, be very still." I tensed in anticipation as her hands hovered up my sides without touching. "You're beautiful to me. Every inch of you…" Her fingertips barely made contact with me as her hands met in my front, leaving a feather-light trail of blue up my chest. "I love every bit of you." With her fingers back at my face, she began delicately tracing divots and dips in my skin, slow as a jet trip. My blood rushed to everywhere she was, and ghosts of her dainty touch were left behind by the coolness of the paint on my warmed flesh.

"What made you want to do this?"

She placed her palms on my shoulders and pressed down subtly until I started to lower myself to the paint-splattered sheet below us, never breaking eye contact.

"I want to appreciate you." She sat on her knees in front of me and dipped her hand in the open bucket of lighter trim paint. "Every little scratch and imperfection." She continued highlighting various scars down my neck and arms, carefully staying within the lines, taking all the time in the world to tenderly feel as much of me as possible with her vaporous, fleeting finger strokes. "They're all beautiful to me. They all add up to you."

She was successfully sucking me into whatever game she was playing, and I was thoroughly entranced. I could feel whispers of her touch crawling all over me and blossoming into warm tingles. Every loving caress lingered, and she was somehow convincing me with them that she really meant it. Somehow, she did think I was beautiful.

I wasn't turned on. I was moved.

It shouldn't have been so hard for me to understand. I loved her and would still think she was beautiful if _she_ turned ghoul. Still sorta wished she would…

She withdrew her hands, leaning back on them to stop and admire her work with detached satisfaction. "So beautiful," she said in breathy placidity, clearly for herself to hear and not for me.

That look in her eyes… I could tell she was seeing _me_. Not the ghoul me, not the me I was before with the smooth skin. Not my chem problems or my troubled past. She was really looking at me and fully reciprocating the intense, pure love I had for her.

Overcome with emotion, I smiled at her with tears of happiness welling up in the corner of my eye.

She suddenly pulled off the t-shirt she had been wearing and tackled me to the cloth, laughing and rolling us around as she deliberately got the wet paint from me all over herself. With both of us thoroughly smeared with the stuff, she stood and held her hand out to me. "Come on, querido. Let's go get cleaned up."

The shared shower we took afterwards didn't end in sex, as one may assume. Instead, we sat in the tub, tangled in an embrace as the water washed over us, swirling the paint in a crystal blue-colored spiral down the drain.

Before that day, I still had some lingering doubts about us, the way she put so much emphasis on the sex in our relationship, but she made it clear to me with her funny finger-painting that I meant more to her than that, whether she was trying to or not. It was one of my favorite moments we've shared. It's so incredibly rare for anyone to be fully present in any given moment, and I'm extremely grateful I was in that one 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deleted a bunch of weird chapters that followed, so that's why it feels unfinished if you sensed that. I'd rather leave it like this, tho than with the funny after-taste it had before. I don't have anything else planned for this series at the moment, but that doesn't mean I won't later. I'm also open to suggestions if you want to message me.
> 
> Thanks for reading,  
> <3 - BDD


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